Ordinary Lives: Photographic Encounters with Black Victorians

Talk outline

In this talk Caroline will be reflecting on the research she is currently undertaking which is supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Fellowship. This work is drawing on new and previous research with photographic archives, to reflect upon the surfacing of the lives of ordinary people. Photographic archives have enabled her to find a way to develop Black and other bodies ‘of colour’ in archives of working people, often in institutions such as asylums and prisons. Although such institutional records do usually record histories of the poor and excluded in forms not of their choosing, they do retain a diversity of English life. The use of such images for research is clearly complex. As part of Caroline’s methodological practice, she continually reflects upon, and grapples with, theoretical and ethical issues raised by her framing and locating of ‘Blackness’ in the photographic archive. Is it, for example, ever possible to take the image of A Black Man out from the frame a Pr*son identification photograph creates at the moment of production? Recent works by Black feminist scholars have proposed new ways of speaking to and with photographs of Black people in order to better understand the struggles, but also joys, of Black life in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In this paper she will be reflecting on the ways she has been exploring these possibilities and will present some of the reframing she has been working on for a new practice of re/presenting ordinary Black lives.

Speaker Biography

Caroline Bressey is Professor of Historical Geography, in the Department of Geography, University College London. Her research focuses upon surfacing the archival Black presence in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century England. She works with a wide range of archival sources, including fan mail, Pr*son and asylum records, digitised newspapers and photography. The Victorian photographic archive is an important site for her research as well as a place that stresses the methodological difficulties of searching for Black lives in the archive. Parallel to this are her interests in ideas of anti-racism in late Victorian society which were the focus of her award-winning book on (perhaps) Britain’s first anti-racist periodical Anti-Caste in Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste. Her interest in how diverse histories are represented in heritage spaces has led to curatorial collaborations with the National Portrait Gallery, the London Museum Docklands and Tate Britain.

Event format

13.00: Welcome and talk start

13.40: Talk finishes

13.40-14.00: Q&A

Please note that a light lunch and refreshments are provided at the event.

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Image credit: Caroline Bressey, Collage featuring a photograph of a female City of London Mental Hospital inmate, c. 1904-1907. Collection The London Archives (CLA/001/B/01/015). Digital image courtesy of Caroline Bressey / The London Archives / City of London Corporation

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