Black Chronicles Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain

If they tell you Black people came to England during the Windrush, show them this collection of extraordinary 19th-century portraits of Black men, women and children in Victorian Britain. 

These pictures are incredibly striking, starting with the image on the cover of a young South African woman named Eleanor Xiniwe and was taken in 1891. Taken over 134 years ago and it looks like it could have been taken yesterday.  It is a great illustration of an alternative decolonial view of time. That time is not linear, but past, present, future are all interconnected.  This photo makes us feel this way.

These striking studio portraits, curated and brought together following ten years of research championed by Autograph, constitute the most comprehensive collection of 19th-century photography depicting the Black subject in the Victorian era, including some of the earliest known images of Black people photographed in Britain. The historically marginalized lives of both ordinary and prominent Black figures of African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian and mixed heritage are seen through a prism of curatorial advocacy and experimental scholarly assemblage.

Black Chronicles features high quality reproductions of plate negatives, cartes de visite and cabinet cards, many of which were buried deep in various private and public archives including the Hulton Archive’s remarkable London Stereoscopic Company collection, unseen for decades. These photographs are linked with imperial and colonial narratives through newly commissioned essays and rare lecture transcripts, in-conversation and text interventions by Caroline Bressey, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Lola Jaye, Renée Mussai and Val Wilmer, and an afterword by Mark Sealy.

Built upon groundbreaking, in-depth new research, Black Chronicles opens up photographic archives to expand and enrich photography’s complex cultural histories and subjectivities, offering an essential insight into the visual politics of race, representation and difference in the Victorian era by addressing this crucial missing chapter.

Introduction and texts by Renée Musai, Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Text by Paul Gilroy, Text by Stuart Hall, Text by Caroline Bressey, Text by Lola Jaye, Text by M. Neelika Jayawardane, Afterword by Mark Sealy, Text by Val Wilmer Published by Thames & Hudson in partnership with Autograph.