Staying Power – Photographs of Black British Experience (1950s-1990s)

 

Jennie Baptiste

Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s is a project to increase the number of black British photographers and images of black Britain in the V&A collection. It aims to raise awareness of the contribution of black Britons to British culture and society, as well as to the art of photography.

Nikki S. Lee

The Punk Project

The Punk Project is one of over a dozen series of photographs in which Korean-born New York photographer Nikki Lee pushes the boundaries of identity and place, of who we are and how others see us in proximity to the people we choose to surround ourselves with. She places herself within the frame of her images, transforming herself into the documented subject after constructing the context and setting the stage. She performs identity – reinventing herself with the stereotypes, media hype, codes, and clues that look into and out from a given community, infiltrates that community, and presents us with a new version of herself. She is a respectful tourist shopping for who she is within a subculture, stretching the very skin of her own identity to find a fit. Her images dig deep into the construction of community and ego, of social roles and what it means to be self-defined and/or categorized by someone else. She ultimately asks, are personal identity and communal identity fluid?

Belfast Exposed Archive

 

Photography maintains a substantial collection of negatives and slides in trust for the community. The collection has been compiled over the past 30 years through contributions from professional and amateur photographers and communities. It represents a valuable historical document recording political, cultural and social change in Northern Ireland over more than 3 decades.

Namsa Leuba

The work of visual artist Namsa Leuba is not easily definable.  A conceptual master, Leuba examines themes of construction and deconstruction, through the use of unidentifiable locations, props, unique colours or configurations that may not have a lucid order. Leuba’s technique can be described as ‘elemental compositing’, as she dissembles cultural paradigms and re-builds them through staged interventions. As of late, her focus has been on African identity as viewed through a Western lens. The series Ya Kala Ben involved research of cultural practices and rituals from the region of Conakry, Guinea in West Africa.  Defined as a ‘crossed look’ this provocative body of images presents masqueraded ceremonies, exorcism practices as well as local acrobats whose flexible bodies are contorted into unique forms.