A fascinating collaboration between the V&A and the Black Cultural Archive charts the changing lives of black people in Britain and tells us much about who we are today
Matthew Ryder
THE GUARDIAN - Saturday 7 February 2015
In 1988, I bumped into a friend walking back from a lecture. “I didn’t see you at the black students’ group,” I said.
“It’s just… all we ever seem to talk about is racism,” she said,
sighing. I was immediately filled with undergraduate indignation: “What
do you mean ‘all’? It’s important!”
“I know,” she replied, “but isn’t there more to being black and British than that?”
It’s a question I have been trying to answer ever since. And it lies at the heart of the exhibition Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s, which is the culmination of a seven-year collaboration between the V&A and Brixton’s Black Cultural Archive.
Over the two locations it features 118 images by 17 artists. The
exhibition shares the name of the famous book by Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain
(1984). But while Fryer’s landmark work was largely concerned with
slavery, colonialism, immigration and racism, this exhibition is
different. Racism, insofar as it features, is merely one element of the
historic backdrop. Instead the focus is on images of the ordinary lives
of black Britons – those of African and Caribbean heritage – in the UK.
Like the conversation with my friend back in 1988, it makes you question
what it is to be black and British.
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