In-Conversation
with Dr. Mark Sealy MBE, Director of Autograph ABP and Dr. Kenneth Montague, Founder of Wedge Collection, moderated by Dr. Julie Crooks, Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recorded discussion on the history and contemporary politics of Black identity as represented in Britain and in Canada.
Julie Crooks
Hello, my name is Julie and I'm the associate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario. And today I will be moderating a conversation between Dr. Mark Sealy of Autograph ABP and Wedge collection founder, Dr. Kenneth Montague. I want to first acknowledge that this land is the territory of the Anishnaabe, the Mississauga nation and also the territory of the Huron Wendat Neutral and Seneca nations. So next July, the High Commission of Canada, in partnership with the Wedge Collection, will present Position As Desired at Canada House Gallery in Trafalgar Square in London. This new iteration of the seminal exhibition will focus on the works of ten Black British and ten African Canadian photographers in anticipation of the physical presentation. A virtual preview featuring select works will be available online beginning this October. So the works of Black British artists provides an important parallel to the African Canadian photography practices explored in position as desired, one finds compelling synergies through this shared histories of colonialism and migration. However, significant differences are also evident vis a vis the evolution of style, expressions of protests, regional perspectives in relation to identity and representation, and even the development of black photography practices. So I want to first introduce our esteemed speakers today, Dr Mark Sealy, he is interested in the relationship between photography and social change, identity politics, race and human rights. He's been director of London based photographic arts charity Autograph ABP since 1991 and has produced numerous artists publications, curated exhibitions and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide, including the critically acclaimed Human Rights Human Wrongs Exhibition, curated right here at the Ryerson Image Center in Toronto in 2013 and at the Photographers Gallery London in 2015. He was awarded the medal by the Royal Photographic Society and the most excellent order of the British Empire. And I'm sorry I have to put that in. Very important. That honorific, which was awarded for services to photography in 2013. His PhD from Durham University focused on photography and cultural violence, was gained in 2016. Dr Kenneth Montague established the Wedge Collection in 1997 in Toronto. The collection is one of Canada's largest privately owned contemporary art collections focused on exploring African diaspora culture and contemporary black life today. The collection comprises over 400 original works by artists from Canada, the US, the UK and throughout the Diaspora. Montague's also the founding director of the non-profit organization Wedge Curatorial Projects. So now that we have the introductions out of the way, I'd like to thank you both for taking the time to share some of your thoughts with me and insights with me. What drew you both to photography? What was it about this medium that you found so fascinating and that you wanted to kind of devote your life to its exploration?
Kenneth Montague
I was born in Windsor, Ontario, the southernmost city in Canada. My folks both came from Jamaica and they arrived well before what we call here in Canada, the Pierre Trudeau years where, you know, Canada's immigration policies finally opened up and people from other places got to share a piece of the pie. So that was really in the 60s and 70s that started. My parents arrived. And in 1995, you know, my mom was at New York University, my dad went to U of T. So they had a very unique experience. They were the only Black students they knew at their colleges at that time. You can imagine the harsh conditions under which they persevered. You know, the day-to-day indignities, the major things like not being able to buy a house, you know, neighbours coming and telling their real estate agent, if your family moves in here, you know, this Black family, your kids won't be able to play with our kids and, you know, crazy stuff. So we were in this little town. We were like the second Jamaican family ever in a place over a hundred thousand people. So we were really, truly an island. And I think that that experience really is the basis of who I am. So Wedge really started as an identity project. It was me trying to navigate through a not so easy path and look at kind of images of my own culture, my own community that I wasn't seeing around me and giving me a lot of cases, just a sort of imaginary and hope, it was a beacon. It was sort of like, you know, photography for me early on was just this light. I remember my folks taking me to the Detroit Institute of Arts and Detroit is right across the river from Windsor. And I can remember seeing that beautiful Diego Rivera mural when I was a 10 year old and seeing photographs from James Van der Zee. They had that famous couple in raccoon coats photograph in the gallery. And I remember it clear as a day when I was a 10 year old and seeing that and seeing the sophistication. And then just this couple with the coats and the whitewall tires and the Cadillac in front of the brownstone in Harlem and thinking, I'm not seeing this depiction of African-Americans anywhere on the television shows that I'm growing up with, you know, "Good Times" and "What's Happening" and all this foolishness, the motivation for this Wedge Project, which was a wedge shaped gallery in my former home, and it became quickly a double entendre, the sort of idea of wedging these black artists into the mainstream of contemporary art. That's kind of a nutshell my origin story in the thing. It continues with the Wedge Collection, a privately owned collection, and this nonprofit Wedge Curatorial Projects. I'm trying to - as my late father says, 'lift as, we rise', bring artists into the fold, bring new work and new ideas, celebrate the many different ways of being Black.
Mark Sealy
I went to art school 80 to 85. My first degree was it was it was in textiles. And I was doing a lot of screen printing work, increasingly using the photographic image, working with kind of layers and textures. I wasn't really thinking about photography as such. It was more a case of making and using it in a kind of collage kind of textual way. And then, you know, through an incredible scholar, a guy called Seurat Maraji, and the kind of art history aspect of it, he very, very, very, very cleverly opened up the lines of inquiry by asking critical questions. One day he simply pulled me aside and said, you know, you realize how unique you are in this institution, there aren't many of you here. But I think in 1982 in Goldsmiths, the fine arts department and the textiles department, which were very much cheek by jowl, I think I was the only Black person in the space. So that's incredible to think about that in South East London, that in the visual arts course that, you know, you kind of stood out in that way. I started using photography in my own making, really newspaper cuttings, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, critically, one left college. And I was curating, of course, talking to colleagues. Things kind of expanded. The whole idea of representations in the of the Black subject in the media was really my interest. It was through the idea rather than photography. So I guess I was always in a place where through the kind of, you know, through the lines of inquiry that Seurat opened up, looking at the politics of representation and of course, writing was beginning to emerge. And you know, texts were being pushed, pushed your way. And at the same time, I was working at a national newspaper in their archives, filing, filing images, filing texts. And you could see there was this massive archive of kind of negative images of the Black subject. I couldn't find anything, you know, just just you know, I was in it. It was in the archives. And that's really a really major part is a very small, you know, low lowly clerks type job. But I had access to, you know, hundreds of what felt like 100 years of newspaper clippings where whether I could just pick the stuff out. And then I went to work for a bunch of left wing socialists called Network Photographers with the wonderful Tricia Ziff who who, you know, was kind enough to give me a job, really. And again, I was looking, you know, filing, working with the photographers, developing stories, selling images to newspapers. I became very aware very, very quickly that there was a formula to all this stuff and that, you know, the famine was represented through the lens of a kind of Eurocentric eye and riots and demonstration, you know, Black people were always impoverished in that space. So the kind of stereotype were very, very, very much alive. And I was working with it again and propagating this stuff. Meanwhile, I was curating shows on the back of conversations with people like Kobena Mercer or Karen Alexander or, you know, like colleagues who were the same age as me and reading Pauls, "Ain't No Black in Union Jack" and, you know, it's a kind of massive machination of political formulations. And the Greater London Council was there, which is about to be scrapped by Margaret Thatcher. So they were this, ethnic minority arts unit, which you could get money from. Right. To do things. So there was a kind of mosaic journey into this space and of course, working in the agency. At that time it was still making its making pieces myself and networking with people like Sunil Gupta and David A. Bailey, becoming closer and closer to this network of critical voices. It just happened in that way, so, you know, I would say that by 1991 I understood the photographic industry. At that time I probably encountered most of people like Dave Lewis, Ingrid Pollard, Joy Gregory. Just through networks and conferences, you could feel the Arts Council trying to do something which the GLC had left behind. And Autograph gets formed in the politics of the moment, really. I've always been asking this ongoing question about what's the work the images are doing and who are they for and what purpose to they serve.And as we all know, the coloniality of photography, if you like, is a very strong, dark presence, which I think we we've been trying to very slowly unpick, if you like, by presenting a different by presenting difference differently, if that makes sense.
Julie Crooks
It does. And it acts as a perfect segue to my next question, which is about this kind of overall politics of representation and the kind of changing styles and trends in photography that have shifted both in the UK and in Canada. So you have this migration and immigration, the African continent, to the UK, to Canada. So what are those shifts? I would say from the 1960's onward, I think it's for Ken - Canada's kind of practices in photography start a little bit later. And that's really interesting to me too, because the UK definitely has the kind of earlier kind of trajectory. What are those style specific styles and trends that you begin to see?
Mark Sealy
What I love about that generation of photographers, let's say, you know, the Neil Kenlock's, the Charlie Phillips, the Armet Francis, The Horace Ove's, you know, Mel VandenBosch, very important woman, who is also taking photographs. And also to some degree, you know, the Ingrid Pollard's of this world. There's a certain sense of what I call care work within the work. It's like there's a community that it's under threat everywhere. And, you know, and it's something I've been thinking about for a while. There was always so much pressure on people to make good images, to become, you know, what I would call the kind of the decisive moment ethics, if you like, around the world. Everything was through the lens of a kind of the Cartier-Bresson document. You know, these were the these were the gold standards that you were working towards. You know, I mean, Gordon Parks understood that. And it's a very kind of particular aesthetic, you know, the Life magazine, the inherited European German documentary kind of tradition. Where everyone was being judged by that. But I always thought instinctively this is something about what these people have been doing, which is more to do with the fact that they care about their communities. Right. Because nobody else did. Right. When people, walked into their communities, they often took something away, which was, where the benefit was for them. But in many ways, people like Vanley Burke, for example, I think the care work in there shows he loves his people. He wants to celebrate those people. And they might not be, you know, the best photographs in the world. You know, they might not be, but they are really important because of the kind of, not social work in terms of hospital or respite, but in terms of the kind of, mental health that you can get as a Black person when you look at, a couple dancing on the floor, because basically prior to their intervention in the making of photography within the UK, everything was riots or everything was kind of exoticized. What they gave us was church, school, hope, young people looking innocently. They gave us style. They gave us kind of literally culture. And I think as time goes on, you know, they are really important and significant narratives as much as they are images in the story of Black presences within the UK. And I kind of celebrate them for that.
Kenneth Montague
Something we didn't discuss yet today is, how Mark and I met and and a lot of ways we're on parallel journeys and we're around the same age. We kind of came up in the same generation. But, you know, this idea of thinking about the Black British artists and artistic practices and then comparing and contrasting with Canada, we can kind of do a little microcosm in our own lives, too, and think about the work that kind of inspired us early on. And I think about, you know, artists in Canada all the time. I was kind of out there beginning to collect art at the beginning of the 90s. The work that spoke to me was a real early kind of first wave of kind of identity art in Canada. So artists like Buseje Bailey I was collecting, and Michael Chambers, David Zapparoli and there are artists like June Clark who were doing amazing work early on, but not recognized until quite recently by institutions. At Wedge, we've just been in the trenches kind of pulling these artists along. And, their work is really on the shoulders of even earlier practitioners and folks who,were not really under the mantle of contemporary art. But,there are Black folks who made images. There are historically in Canada from way back. There are histories throughout the country where we see the evidence of African Canadians in the photography of the times, stereographs and all kinds of daguerreotypes and early works. You know, Julie, you did a show with Free Black North that at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto that really kind of exposed, an art audience, a contemporary art audience to that not so well known history. With image making taking place early on, much earlier than people realize with the Black community. I think of a work that I acquired in my Wedge Collection, an image of John Hall. And John Hall was the town crier in Owen Sound, Ontario, a small town north of Toronto. His story is on a parallel with, you know, many stories that we hear like 12 Years a Slave and so forth. This guy was born just outside of Windsor, where I was born - very close to the US border. He was sold into slavery as a young man, he was a slave in Kentucky, was an enslaved person who broke out of that, escaped, came back, served with Tecumseth in the War of 1812. He was both of Black and Indigenous blood. So he has this very interesting history, that parallels Canadian history. And he went on and lived until one hundred and seventeen years old. You know, I have a photograph of him at one hundred and fourteen, being the town crier, the person that announced the news on the corner in this little town that had a small community of Black folks that were exclusively runaway slaves. There's this early evidence of Black folks arriving, then taking pictures of themselves. There's a studio portrait kind of history. And then we come to this next generation where I've collected a lot of works of artists like Stacey Tyrell and Dawit Petros and many others who have taken this kind of migration story. And I think of Sandra Brewster as a great contemporary example artist who's working now and thinking about her Guyanese roots and her parents coming from Guyana and celebrating that kind of migration, that immigration story in her work, but also thinking about how she moves through the world as a second generation Black Canadian like myself. All of these artistic practices really are on a trajectory from this early work. And I also have to finish by saying that meeting Mark, I'm going to go turn around the full circle with the story of meeting Mark, probably in the year 2000 or somewhere around there. I think I bought the book Different and it's here right in front of me here. Sorry to put you on, Mark, but it's a seminal book for me as a nonacademic, someone who came into art as someone who is passionate about artists and just did a lot of reading. So, seeing work like Joy Gregory and other work in this book, which I bought in a bookstore called Pages in Toronto, which is now gone, I remember the day that I saw it with its unique cover, a photography book with text on the cover. But anyway, this is the first time that I read Stuart Hall. Of course, I've read much more work of his now. But this was a book that Stuart and Mark co-authored. You know, when I read that book, I fell on my knees in the bookstore. It was like someone is putting this together because I'm having this kind of thought about putting together work and the storytelling and what's really happening in the moment with Black Canadian artists, and I didn't realize that this was work that had been happening in London and in the UK for years and years. So there was a Bible, there was a new Bible for me to sort of study. And I bought a lot of work from you, and Autograph that really embellished my collection. And so early on, I've seen this parallel with, you know, Black Canadian, Black British artists that I feel like that kind of dynamic in a lot of ways speaks to me more than African-American artists. Although I grew up right across from Detroit, there's a certain and all three of us, I think can speak to this in our own families. There's a certain strange duality with your parents, this love and hate with the queen and, you know, colonialism - like in Jamaica. You know, Stuart Hall spoke a lot about this strange thing that we were taught to put Mother England on this pedestal. So it became the strange thing where I would criticize because it was so obvious that there was an oppression happening, especially in those Thatcher years. And I remember visiting London as a little kid, the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 and buying God Save the Queen under the counter at Piccadilly Circus. You couldn't get it, but it was mine. It was a number one song on the radio and it was just fascinating for me to spend that time there. At that critical moment in my life as a teenager, I was like "yeah, I get it". I get what is happening in my life and what's happening here and how it relates. So I've always felt this kinship with the Black British art movement because it speaks to me in a very visceral way. And I think that this particular iteration of this long running show with work from my collection, this Position of Desired. We always change it up in each venue. It's been to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto where it originated and it's been to the Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax, and it's been to my hometown the Art Gallery of Windsor. In each of those places, we kind of thought about the local. And here for this upcoming presentation in the UK, I think it's very appropriate to take ten works of Black British artists from my Wedge collection and put it with ten works of African Canadian artists. This is the way that I'm thinking about the show because of this history, it always spoke to me in a way that is being made evident in this show. And I'm going to end this long answer by quoting Julie Crooks, our moderator. This is the catalog for the original show at the ROM Position as Desired with Dawit Petros' iconic work on the cover. Julie actually wrote the essay, the main essay in our catalogue. And there's these two pillars that this show was founded on. It's so interesting that Julie quoted Stuart Hall and Austen Clarke, who's a great Canadian novelist, Black Canadian novelist. The two epigraphs for this essay are: "Cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as being it belongs to the future as much as to the past.It is not something which already exists.Transcending place, time, history, culture, like everything else, which is historical, identities, undergo constant transformation identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by and position ourselves within the narratives of the past." And of course, that's the famous quote from Stuart Hall.
Mark Sealy
Goosebumps Goosebumps.
Kenneth Montague
It really is goosebumps. And then, here's the Canadian and Julie positioned this right away: Austen Clarke says, "How do I resist the dermatology of Canadian culture imbued in me over all these years and have the racial forwardness and to regard myself as African? And why should I? Merely to give my protest a sharper context? Or more bluntly, to evade the wounding of being called 'coloured', 'Negro', 'blasted Jamaican or West Indian'? Do I look more African than Canadian? If I permit this am I saying Canadians are white and Africans are black? And if one is Black, one cannot have been born here, one cannot be Canadian?" So between those two things and and then having this opportunity with Canada House Gallery in London to put Black, British and Black Canadian artists works together...
Mark Sealy
I mean, I always think good curating is not about answering questions. It's about opening up. It's not about giving people answers, but asking questions. So that's one of the problems that the institutions have. You know, they want you to have the definitive history of Rembrandt or the definitive history of David Hockney or history or something. I mean, there is no definitive position and people always want the Black subject to be nailed down. When Stuart reminds us of the end of the essential Black subject, I felt liberated because, you know, the idea that we have to be fixed either in gender, either in race, either in class, that we can't transcend, that we have to be some body rather than be multiple selves. Because, I am completely interested in lots of different things, which I could bore the living daylights out of people. But, you know, it's there. We are complex subjects. And that's all we require. And for me, that's a quest towards justice and equality.
Julie Crooks
Because I'm really fascinated with a lot of what you've both said, this notion of care, because both of you are thinking about these worlds of photography in the ways in which you care for them, through your curation, through your collecting, through your writing. I want to segway to the next question, but I think that it so important when you're thinking about the Black subject, because what you just said is about the contrast between a kind of pathology, the pathologizing of the Black body, which always is fixing us, and then the ability to release us. Using Black photographers throughout the ages to kind of unfix us from that frame literally. From the lens of the pathology of Blackness, the fixing of Blackness. And when you're constantly faced with that, there is only one way to look at Black people. It doesn't matter if they're in Mali or in Kingston or in Toronto or in Brixton. We are all kind of judged on the epidermis. Right. Which is what Stuart used to talk about. I'm thinking again about those two quotes and how fitting they are for today. [Stuart] Hall transcends and is enduring from then until now. I think he really seems to have influenced both of you in your practices.
Mark Sealy
Yeah. I worked with Stuart for 18 years, so I've been able to go on a journey with Stuart as a kind of mentor and and a colleague and a dear friend. It was great. That was the exercise. I mean, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, for example is an amazing scenario where, you've got an incredibly avant garde, complex contemporary artist presenting you the culture through the lens of queer politics and diasporic difference who's an outsider, as he says on three accounts - geographically, sexually and not being the kind of child that his parents wanted. And how having that, you know, haven't been able to try and get people to understand the complexities of what he was doing and not having it just registered through the lens of, say a Mapplethorpian register of what the Black body was in terms of sexuality or place or objects of desire has been something that I particularly enjoyed. Now the institutions get it because fortunately we've been able to commission the scholarship around a lot of it right now to get people to understand that there is another cosmology out there. There are other systems of knowledge that can be visualized. If only we could be more generous. And I think actually underpinning a lot of the identity politics, is the idea that people want to present new knowledge systems about who we are. I think that, for me, is an incredible act, a radical act of unpicking and decolonizing the lens, which has been applied to the making of the Black subject in photographic history. And like Kenneth, I love the raccoon coat photograph. I love it because it's decadent. I love it because it's wealthy. I love it because it's like, how much did that car cost? Right. I love it because it's full of all the decadence that you want from something that's successful. Right. And we know that we've had a deficit in terms of our visual understanding of the Black subject as being something that's rich. Right. Van der Zee is consciously or unconsciously gave us that richness in the work. He was one of the first artists that I wanted to bring to the UK and he still was outside of the canon when we were presenting it in the early 90s, still hardly referenced in the historical canon. So you could turn and you could say, let's look at the history of photography. It's a tragic shame that up until about 1993, 1994 many of the great Black photographers from North America, including Canada and across Europe, and other parts of the world, and Indigenous people have been simply left out of the story. Why is the question. We've been also celebrating the complexities of what these artists can do and trying to give them a platform for it, which you've also been doing. Kenneth and Julie we've been sharing creating platforms, arguing within our institutions that this is valuable. Can you please care for it as well? We do. Can you not do it? I guarantee you that other people will. Yes, there's an audience for this stuff. All these questions which we've been asked: "Who will come and see it? Do you know, this is a fee paying gallery? We don't have any Black people coming to our spaces. You know, we don't understand it? And is it really that important? Isn't it community based? Oh, it's rather didactic, isn't it? Rather protesty?" All these things... Right now they can't get enough. They're struggling to catch up.
Kenneth Montague
Thanks Mark, I just got yesterday at my dental clinic [holds up magazine]. We can't put out magazines because of covid now so I took home the magazines in the waiting room. So the new Vanity Fair came with Amy Sherald's beautiful work of Breonna Taylor on the cover. I saw this great article with a lot of folks that we all know. So, it's a kind of an article by Kimberly Drew about a new museum. As the art world experiences renewed scrutiny. Curators, administrators and artists imagine templates for change. So they interview Thomas Lax, Legacy Russell and here's here's my friend Tiona McClodden. She's saying: "Black artists should not stop working or presenting our work at this moment. Art is language and for many of us, that is how we process and work through the intersections of our lives. Our cultural institutions must understand that they will have to rework from the inside out. Change will not occur without a conflict in the attempt to repair many years of exclusion, and institutions must care for the Black artists and staff within these spaces." We have to keep moving and infiltrating within institutions. I mean, gosh, this is a deeper conversation now, but that's the work I feel that I need to do and that's my purpose right now.
Mark Sealy
You can go head-to-head with the institution or you can get in the institution and change it. I mean, I think both strategies can yield different results and they're both different. People need to operate in different ways. But changes is on the agenda, that's for sure. My trajectory of my career is to try and get inside these places to try and do that, even though it's been uncomfortable and we've built an institution that's kind of outside of that. But I want to sell work to institutions. We've built a collection, but I'm happy to let the collection go to the Tate. I think it's better in that space. I'm not interested in kind of cultural apartheid either. We're part of the same story. I'm interested in white artists, as well, who are trying to do the race work. I'm happy to support that. It's going to be horrible. It's going to be clunky. It's going to be - oh, my God. Difficult conversations to be had. But when we get to a place where we can have a proper, honest conversation about the making of race, if you like then, we're going to be in a better place. Understand the constructions of this stuff. You've got Christina Sharpe now in Toronto. Her book "In the Wake" is just an amazing, an amazing human story. It's, of course, got visual images in there and photography plays an important part but what I get from Christina really is just - I can get goosebumps talking about this stuff - is an understanding that she's trying to share her humanity with us. And I think all the good artists, whether it's Carrie Mae Weems or whether it's Dawoud Bey or whether it's Vanley Burke or whether it's Maxine Walker ... These people have been trying to say this stuff you keep on nailing me down with, it says more about you than it does about me.
Julie Crooks
I found a quote by Deana Lawson, African-American photographer, about why she trains the camera on herself. So she says: "At least once a year I make a self-portrait. It's an occasion for the artist to construct her representation through her own medium. It's an opportunity to declare who you are visually and who you aspire to be. A self-portrait considers the interiority of the artist. It's a moment for self reflection to pause and look at yourself." And I would add as a human being. So what is it about the kind of self portrait that you have been drawn to in both of your collections? Just based on what Lawson is talking about in terms of her practice and turning that lens on herself?
Kenneth Montague
There's many ways to think about a self-portrait. I think the the title of our show Position As Desired actually comes from a work that is by Stacey Tyrell, a Black Canadian artist who is from Canada but parents born in Nevis. It's a kind of a found photo from her mom's old photo album from London, England. So her mom did that Windrush generation and got herself to the to the motherland from the Caribbean kind of post-war. And she was studying, in London. That's a picture from her mom's photo album and the artist in an attempt at a kind of personal story, a self-portrait - is taking her mother and her mother's old photograph. Thinking about those legs and those black legs and those white legs. There's a kind of a sameness and a difference there obviously. What you're thinking about is this person inserting herself into this new culture, and you can imagine what stories she would have to tell about these new relationships and what she's experiencing, not unlike my parents coming to predominantly white culture. So, that's a great kind of portrait of the artist. She's doing this this thing. And interestingly, in that case, the actual photo album from London that she found the work in - the text in the album is one of those old 70s albums where you lift up the cellophane and put the print inside. It literally said: "Carefully lift plastic cover and position as desired." Which I just thought was so great. The artist then uses this as her thesis work coming out of the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Then I see this work in a nonprofit gallery - Gallery 44 in this show of young artists, and it just completely speaks to me more than a decade ago. Then it ends up being the title work for the show where we're positioning the work, this work by Black Canadian artists where WE desire. Inserting ourselves in the case of the first iteration of the show in the Royal Ontario Museum among these European forefathers to do this intervention and put these photos in there. And now coming full circle to London to bring this photograph back home. Very interesting for me and very heartening, actually. I feel like the self-portrait is such an important part of why I collect, because, again, it all started as a kind of a reflection of self. I see Vanley Burke's Boy With Flag and I think that's the kid that I was or the kid that I wanted to be. I was never as cool as that kid in the park, but I did see that photograph and think, yeah, that's me on my bike, standing my ground as a Black Canadian kid, the way he has a Union Jack and says, this is who I am. So, yeah, the self portrait for me is many different things. It's a very wide open definition.
Mark Sealy
Well, I mean, the whole idea of Autograph... Well, the first exhibition or key exhibition is autoportraits. I get the idea of Deana's about self signing who you are. I think that the idea of disrupting the historical presentation from 15, 16, 17, 18, 19th century painting where the Black subject is always a kind of addition to somebody else's story, is always in the background. Who was carrying some meaning, some symbolism in there that had to do with some kind of Hogarthian kind of investigation at the best of times or or just to be anonymous. So the autoportrait or the autograph is absolutely about a signature being. It's like I am here. I deserve the right to narrate my own story. I will turn this camera on myself - Maxine Walker, Joy Gregory, Ingrid Pollard, Maude Saulter, it goes on and on and on and on. Then the displaced search for the self through artists like Vanley Burke saying this is my community. This is who I am. I mean, there are, of course, problems with people speaking for communities as such but there's a certain sense the "I care for this community" space in there. I think the understanding, the nature that you can scribe your own visualization in that and insert that into the history of photography is is very, very, very, very significant. This is what happened to Autograph - there was a kind of split, an ideological split between the documentary tradition and what I would say the kind of more post-modern way of working. Those that have been to art school and those that have been self taught. And the Sunil Gupta's of this world had been to art school, and they evolved into these artists in the gallery. They were turning away from the documentary tradition because they couldn't quite give them what they wanted. And then there was the Armet Francis or Neil Kenlocks, mainly Black men, straight Black men who were wanting to be this documentary kind of guys who were aspiring to a kind of Magnum kind of ethos, a kind of classic documentary tradition. In Autograph, we pushed the more avant garde. And then the text starts to arrive with Ingrid Pollard in her piece "Pastoral Interludes", where also thought starts to begin. The artist is now saying: here I am, or here this person is. So you know, the image can't do it all so image/ text plays a very important part in lots of artist's work as well. A conversation with all of those artists self portraits that have happened in the past, whether it's Van Gogh or Rembrandt or whoever, it's like we too can do this work too. I mean, a collection based on artists self portraits well that would be amazing. It would be great. I don't know anybody who's doing it, but there's definitely an open corridor for that. One of the things I really enjoyed was the, you know, Du Bois's 1900 images from Paris. I mean, when we showed that it was great. Because they were in Washington, D.C. as digital files and they were really, really accessible. To be able to download and a really cheap exhibition to do. But no one had done that exhibition for years. I mean someone will probably prove me wrong, but we put out a good hundred of the images. I remember Henry Louis Gates was like: "where did you get these from"?
Kenneth Montague
Under your nose!
Mark Sealy
Right. I think that's really, really quite important because that's it, isn't it? It's right. What I think Du Bois was trying to do as an early curator, I would argue one of earliest Black photographic curators, was to try and present these portraits of people which were trying to undo all this baggage that was simply being put on them. He was trying to say this is Blackness as well. From blonde, blue-eyed subjects to kind of classic African-American features. So there you go. That's a really radical act in 1900. So we've been we've been doing this curatorially for 150 years.
Kenneth Montague
And it keeps just evolving like you think of Liz Johnson Artur and her Black Balloon Archive. Yeah. The celebration of the beauty of ordinary Black life. I love this idea. I'm thinking about Black British artist like Dennis Morris, who we've seen with Wedge in my collection. And Dennis is as a teenager taking pictures of other Black folks in Hackney, growing up Black in London series. So important. And it completely spoke to me just again the MC and Selecta at a basement party, brothers at the Black house, you know, thinking about these, they're not lost histories, but they're not lost because artists like Dennis Morris is pushing to kind of get those images out there. And institutions like Autograph are making it, ensuring that people see this stuff.
Mark Sealy
The economy of these things are really important because it's about how do we afford these things? I remember saying to to one of our funders, the Arts Council, they're saying how many copies have been sold? I mean, Dennis's books sold. OK, so it's not so bad. Publishing was really quite, quite key. We used to do these little books dedicated to photographers and monographs, not collections. But we were desperately trying to give people their own voice. Little square books, good reproduction. We tried to do like a thousand of them and we're giving them away to people, selling them for three and four pounds. People asked how many of them were selling and I'd say it doesn't matter that they sell, it matters that they exist. Now they're in the British Museum and now they've got an ISBN number on them. They have to be part of the national collection legally. You have to deposit them there. So there's no escaping the fact that in 100 years time these documents will exist. I don't care and no one's going to buy them now, but they may well value them later on in time. That was really difficult for people to understand the value of publishing. This is, of course, pre-Internet. I still do think the book...
Kenneth Montague
You and I both and the three of us but we're old school, everyone is like, just put it online. But I really think the physical document I mean, I'm a big book collector of photobooks. And I think, you know, that will never die.
Mark Sealy
The value of the materiality, the printing image on the page...
Julie Crooks
It's a document. It's a document that something existed.
Mark Sealy
That for me was at the heart of what I wanted to do with the Autograph. Like exhibitions come and go. A transformative moment for me was when we did the Windrush 1998 show in Ealing in a gallery. And Stuart comes in and we got all these photographs of early arrivants from Tilbury Docks and unpacking this stuff. He is so charged with kind of emotive, emotive, praxis. He's an embodiment of the images is there. He just breaks down. And I was like, wow. There were all these elderly West Indians who for the first time had their story been seen. Right. And trust me, it was a good show, but it wasn't a great show. But it's probably a show that made me then turn back to the documentary moment. And I thought, if not documentary then what? We still got these documentary narratives to tell. So I love my avant gardes. I love my Rotimi Fani-Kayode's. But I then turned explicitly back to we must we must celebrate also these documentary moments. The two have to exist in parallel. I love my Clement Cooper's really important interventions around the documentary moment as well.
Julie Crooks
That is the perfect against the way to my next question, which is about what are the new trends? What are you seeing amongst the new generation of contemporary Black, British and Black Canadian photographers? Is it a move away from the documentary to a more abstract conceptual practice? What say you? And what about the compelling practices that show up on Instagram and other social media platforms? Because I have seen some really hot photographers on Instagram and I wonder and they don't really care about getting into an institution or getting a gallery show, et cetera. But they're producing some really, really compelling photographs.
Kenneth Montague
You know where to start.There's so many interesting emerging artists that I follow. I think as an example in Canada, Yannick Anton, who does fantastic kind of party portraits, he goes to events. He does this great series from a kind of a roving dance party in Toronto called Yes, Yes, Y'all. That's a very kind of wide open gender fluid kind of event. That is a place where you can just love and be loved, really safe space. And he is the event photographer. So he does this documentary practice, but it's very commercial. You know, he's selling images as well. He's going to take the job if a company or corporation says, hey, we love your work and can you shoot this product or shoot this, we have this idea. He has no problem, as so many young artists have no problem kind of working both sides of it, working as a commercial artist, working the fine art mode. There's no conflict like back in the day when it was like, oh, if you do an ad or do something, gosh, you know, you're moving away from that Henri Cartier-Bresson kind of thing, like, it has to be the sort of, you know, old school thing where fine art means this and commercial needs that. That will just continue now. I look at Socials now and look at Instagram and see the plethora of just wonderful work that's happening and all the artists are being celebrated. Tyler Mitchell is a great example in American artists that are just sort of, you know, just have this huge presence on social media and have this built in audience. Their voice is is heard in new ways, new for us. As older folks in the game. We know both worlds. But this this current world where, there's so much image making and so much variety with it, I embrace it. I think it's great. I mean, there's a lot of artists coming out of school. I think of artists whose work will be in the show. Bidemi Oloyede and Bidemi is using an old school, one of the oldest photographic techniques. He's making tintypes times, taking pictures of like contemporary Black artists, using this old technology. So he's embracing something old in the creation of something new. I'm just fascinated by all the new practices that are coming along. I'm sure it's the same in England.
Mark Sealy
I can't keep up. What's interesting to me is watching the explosion of young Asian women. So there's a really strong Pakistani, Bangladesh, Indian presence doing really strong work. It's almost as if there's an nouveau confidence among Asian women here in the U.K. now, which is really saying, I'm going to speak to this stuff, too. Right. I'm going I'm going to join this kind of complicated, you know, visual world and presence, ideas about me being here, being there, being traditional, being contemporary. I think those spaces are really, really interesting. I think there's a huge amount of funky stuff that's fine. There's a huge amount of staging stuff. I mean, I can't remember the name of Antwaun (Sargeant) did the Aperture Book recently. Hats off to the fashion world as well. In that sense, I think they they're savvy, they're smart. They understand they're much more commercial. And they're and they move very fast. I do worry about the speed of that because, whatever goes up quick tends to come down quite quickly, too. I do worry about fashion, but let's see what it all means. I can only say that. There are some worrying trends within some of this as well, because, you know, I do think some some material looks great, but I'm not quite sure the work it's doing just yet.
Kenneth Montague
Another artist from the show, Jalani Morgan, that's created an iconic image from the first Black Lives Matter Toronto kind of protest. It was from the year 2014. He has this image that he took of the bird's eye view and the major sort of people square in Toronto, Dundas Square, I think that was around the time of Eric Garner's murder. This photograph is in a great important documentary tradition around protests and making sure people know that this thing happened at this place at this time. And he's a young photographer, that's doing that tradition. It's not just all, you know, faster than fashion. There's a lot of emerging photographers that are, kind of pursuing something tried and true, but with new eyes and a new way of seeing. That's an amazing sort of development, too, that, you know, you've got this long tradition of, around protest and protest movement.
Mark Sealy
I think successful artists understand the history of the medium. There's an immediacy within making images that, what I'm saying is that sometimes that's worryingly immediate, if you know what I mean. For example, I was in Houston just before the lockdown thing happened and Earlie Hudnall, a local historical Houstonian photographer. I mean, it was so humbling. The guys like, you know, printing in his room and he's doing the stuff is like working in Ward 3 and 4 in the city forever, which is, you know, beautiful images of like just every, just just doing the work, just grinding it out. What I would say, going to church, doing the thing, just getting to the altar of trying to represent his community in a way that says this is the day of our life. Nothing sensational. I think it's just so rich. Here we have an old boy in Texas on the edge of Houston who's just been quietly grinding it out day after day, doing a job at the university, picking up his camera and back just to full circle in that way of just caring, just really caring. Rather than trying to move towards celebrity, just caring about making good things. Because I think instinctively people like that know that they're actually leaving behind something really important. It's not about the moment and it's about what will be found later that year.
Julie Crooks
Again, Mark, you have perfectly segued into my last question about the moment. The current climate, global pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement moment that's challenging anti-Black, systemic racism and police violence. How will photographers, Black photographers memorialize this moment? Will it be immediate or will they take some time to reflect and process and then start, producing work? That is, again, a reflection of this moment.
Kenneth Montague
It's about not forgetting about, the important history, Black Canadian history that just was never in the books that I studied at school, never shown to me. It was just there was such an erasure for me growing up. So when I look at work from, say, Stan Douglas, with this combination of a kind of a Black imaginary. Having the license to recreate history in a way that, is super subjective and kind of through his eyes. Thinking about work from his mid century modern studio and the Malabar people, of an invented bar, in Vancouver, but really based on a real place, where people, Black people felt safe and could hang out and do their thing. And so there's this image Dancer like a woman, kind of a model dressed to be this person from this imaginary place. This Black imaginary, paired with the reality of this history, this kind of new wave of storytelling I'm really interested in. I think of Anique Jordan also has this image, 94 Chestnut at the Crossroads, this iconic image that talks about a long forgotten Black community in Toronto right downtown where City Hall is inToronto. It's an old Black church, a kind of the ghost of that congregation exists in a construction site now at the very place where this thing existed. For me, the kind of thinking about the new ways in which we might kind of consider our history through photographic storytelling, those are two images and two art practices that are kind of giving us a clue that it's a very complicated and very wonderful history where you can you have the right to take the thing and kind of tell your own story. I really kind of fascinated by that kind of work.
Mark Sealy
The first thing we did when when we realized lockdown was happening is we commissioned 10 photographers under the umbrella of the title is: Care, Contagion and Community. The idea was, again, to try and give people some time to buy them some time just to think about what that might be. We were very, very careful in our selection of who would who would be given some money. We invited you know, some people have been working for a while and some younger artists as well. And the idea of that is to just say that this is a very special time. We are open to anything you want to do. Don't worry if it's got failure built into it, we don't know where we are, where we're going. Make something, if you can, if not, then don't worry about it. We'll talk to you about something else. I think, of course, the Black Lives Matter moments, will be well documented. I know lots of Black photographers who are out there with their cameras that anybody who's got a that that's all good. For me, I felt. What do we do with the internal space now? The sense that, some of us feel like we've been here before, it's like there's a kind of deja vu around it. Some people who are young, maybe 20, 25, have never been here before. So it's exciting and a great a great time for change. So I guess that kind of, you know, in a Fanonian way, the impact... I'll share with you, actually, because I think it's the right time to do it. You know, it's been hard work, right? This race work.
Kenneth Montague
Very hard.
Mark Sealy
So well in many ways. It's like some sometimes, you know, the grind of, you know, literally feels the grind between a hard, too hard place is the internal world and the external world. In a racialized curator and working in a racialized space has not been easy. I have to say that it's been great.
Julie Crooks
Tell me about it.
Mark Sealy
Yeah. And I think I'm quite happy. I've been saying for a very long time, it's all work, right? Different people, different positions. People upset because they haven't had something. You're a gatekeeper, you're not a gatekeeper, your facilitator. You haven't collected their work. You haven't shown their work. When there's been very little on the table and a lot of people want it, it's really hard just to not get the pie get turned into a mess. We've been at it for generations from Du Bois and many before - Equiano. It's trying to write those stories, right. Trying to be valued. So value and care. So the issue is, I hope the the way that it's narrated is both sensitive and political and inclusive and honest.
Julie Crooks
Wonderful. Well, on that note, I want to thank you both, Dr. Ken Montague, Dr. Mark Sealy, for a really illuminating and compelling and fascinating conversation.
Thank you. And we all look forward to the Canada House and Wedge Collection partnership and many more opportunities across the pond.