Photographer Joy Gregory on her new mission, many years within the making: ‘A lot of people I worked with on it have died’ | Photography

Tright here weren’t many Black college students on the Royal College of Art when Joy Gregory was a pupil within the Eighties, however she did examine alongside artist and Blk Art Group founder Keith Piper, who was placing collectively a Black pictures exhibition. “He asked me if I would submit some work,” says the 65-year-old artist.

Piper had favored her work, which explored themes of colonialism, magnificence, gender and race. However, her submission was rejected by the organisers on the idea that it merely wasn’t Black sufficient. “You have to recognise the political climate at that time around practice and making a mark and I was basically taking pictures of flowers,” says Gregory. “For me, you have the right to make whatever work you want. By shutting down what can and cannot be, you start to censor yourself. I was a bit pissed off, thinking: why should you pander to what people think you should be and sit within the box that they’ve created?”

Understanding the capabilities of pictures has all the time been of nice significance to Gregory, who was given the £110,000 Freelands award in 2023. It’s a journey that started by experimenting with plenty of self-portraits. Her 1990 work Autoportrait is maybe what she is greatest identified for. It’s a set of 9 particular person black-and-white self-portraits, every one uniquely angled. “I think for years people thought that was the only work I had ever made,” she says.

Gregory’s physique of labor spans media starting from nonetheless life to portraiture to movie to textiles and explores id, cultural reminiscence and linguistic traditions. More than 250 of her works might be on show at her retrospective Catching Flies With Honey at London’s Whitechapel Gallery from October. Visitors to the present can count on to see sequence reminiscent of The Blonde, which examines Eurocentric concepts of magnificence and Language of Flowers, impressed by the Victorians’ symbolic use of flowers to speak messages.

She’ll even be debuting a bit that has taken twenty years to make. “The new commission, if I ever manage to pull it off, looks at research I’ve been doing since 2003 on endangered languages. I’ve been working with a single community and family for over 20 years. A lot of people that I worked with on it have died, and they expected something to happen eventually, so it was important to have some sort of object to show to the community.”

Born in Bicester in England in 1959 to Jamaican mother and father, Gregory was inventive from a younger age. She painted, drew, made garments and skim at the least one guide a day. “We lived near a bindery, so when the company would throw books out that had mistakes, they would end up in a dumpster and I would pick those books out and sit and read them.” She obtained her first digital camera for her 18th birthday, which she says value her household “all the money that they ever had”.

Gregory’s desires have all the time been easy: “My aspirations were about making good work.” Since the early days, she has prioritised innovation. Be it cyanotype or salt printing, pictures strategies are as essential as the subject material in making a memorable, singular picture. “With digital, everything can be absolutely perfect all the time. But I’m interested in the idea of human intervention,” says Gregory. “Each one of these prints being unique and not repeatable. The perfection becomes about the human touch.”

Joy to the world: 5 works from the Whitechapel

Memory and Skin, 1998
“Memory and Skin was the first major commission that I had. It was about exploring the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean. Having grown up in a Caribbean family in Europe, you become bilingual, bicultural. It was about being able to look between the two, [and explore] people’s assumptions about Europe and what they thought of the Caribbean.”

The Fairest, 1999 (predominant picture)
“I got on to the idea of: why would anyone want to become blond? I chose some people from European and non-European backgrounds to talk about what it was like being blond and that became the film The Fairest.”

The Blonde, 1997–2010
“In 1998, there were suddenly a lot of non-European people with blond hair,” says Gregory. “Be they from Asia, Africa or the Caribbean, they were turning the notion of what it is to be a blond on its head. Blond had always been seen as something very European, but it was also about being an object of desire, feeding into the whole Marilyn Monroe thing. There were furious rants on chatrooms about these people betraying their race, but they were playing with the idea of being able to choose your identity, which was really fascinating.”

The Handbag Project, 1998-present
“These are handbags I brought back from South Africa. When I got back to London, I just wanted to do something very physical, and salt printing is a really interesting process. You coat the paper with salt, dry it, then coat it with silver nitrate. Each time you make a print, it would be a surprise when you put it out in the sun.”

Language of Flowers, 1992-2004
“The reason for using cyanotype for Language of Flowers is because it was Victorian language and a Victorian process. [English botanist and photographer] Anna Atkins used cyanotypes and photography, and put plants on to sensitive paper as a way of recording what was present in the world at that time. Everything is so fragile, and it’s interesting how we’re always looking for permanence as a way of holding on.”

Catching Flies With Honey is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, from 8 October to 1 March.