A panel of four key protagonists reflect on their experience, and the journey, and movement, for Black Photography in Britain since the 1970s – thirty-five years since Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers, was founded. Speakers will share accounts of the landscape for Black photographers in the 1970s and 1980s; the campaign to create a base for Black photography, and Autograph’s Brixton origins; and the evolution of Autograph as an institution, and catalyst for debate about race, rights and representation in the present.

Sunil Gupta, artist photographer, curator and queer activist, who with Rotimi Fani-Kayode and others, led public debates around issues of race and representation, and were founding signatories to Autograph.

Joy Gregory, artist photographer whose first monograph was published by Autograph in 1995, completing work on Shining Lights: Black Women in Photography in the UK 1980s-90s (to be published by Mack in early 2024).

Mark Sealy OBE, curator and campaigner, director of Autograph since 1991, and author of two books recently published by Lawrence and Wishart, Decolonising the Camera, Photography in Racial Time (2019) and Photography: Race Rights and Representation (2022). He is currently working on a new survey of the work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

Chair: Chris Boot, independent, formerly director of the Aperture Foundation, 2011 – 2021.