Reflecting on last week’s Raw Social with Ingrid Pollard

We had a wonderful time hosting acclaimed British photo artist Ingrid Pollard at our Raw Social, thank you to the artist and to everyone who came along!

To give a very brief biography, Ingrid played an important role in the ’80s, documenting black people’s creativity and presence in Britain. She became known for her photographic series questioning social constructs such as Britishness and racial difference. While investigating race, ethnicity and public spaces she has developed a body of work using landscape and portraiture to provide a context for issues of migration, family and home. She is concerned with social and geographical sites, the people who occupy them, and their stories. This disseminates through her work, which has been focused around feminism, community outreach, alienation, promoting the arts in schools, challenging racial stereotypes, and giving voice to the working class.

Some examples of the works she spoke with us about are a series of photographs, and an art research project. In the series titled ‘Oceans Apart’ she questions the play between identity, coast, and border thinking. In focusing on black people interacting with typically British rural settings, reacting to the Atlantic Ocean as a physical and psychic space, she invokes the more general theme of belonging in Britain. She challenges the association of a black face with an urban environment, as the stereotype persists to this day. And in her exhibition ‘Spectre of the Black Boy‘ which led to her book ‘Hidden in a Public Place’ she investigates racist imagery through pub signage, and how the black boy image is manipulated to look exotic.

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The full talk & slideshow will be uploaded soon, thanks for making the event a thought-provoking and a creatively challenging one!