Raphael Albert: Miss Black and Beautiful

Born on the Caribbean island of Grenada, photographer and entrepreneur Raphael Albert has gained a reputation for his role as one of the leading cultural promoters of black beauty in recent times. Throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s Raphael both documented and celebrated West London’s black beauty pageants, challenging conventional notions of beauty implicated in the social, cultural and political contexts of the time, and providing a space for Afro-Caribbean self-fashioning. Autograph ABP in Shoreditch presents ‘Miss Black and Beautiful’ the late Raphael Albert’s first major solo exhibition.

As a young artist living in the West Indies during the 1950s, Raphael found himself struggling to make ends meet, so one day packed everything he owned into a small suitcase and set out for the United Kingdom. After studying photography at Ealing Technical College and working part-time in a Lyons cake factory, Raphael dedicated himself to a long-term career as a freelance photographer.

Raphael was first introduced to the black beauty pageant scene while on an assignment for newspaper West Indian World, where he found himself documenting Miss Jamaica. Stunned by the absence or marginalised presence of the ‘black is beautiful’ aesthetic in mainstream fashion, in 1970 Raphael established the local contest Miss Black and Beautiful, from which this exhibition derives its name, followed in 1974 by Miss Teenager of the West Indies in Great Britain, and later Miss West Indies in Great Britain. His efforts culminated in the founding of his own modelling school.

His photographs, spanning more than three decades, offer the viewer a rare opportunity to contemplate an aspect of fashion history which is often overlooked. Contestants in these pageants inevitably wore the obligatory bathing costumes and high heels, but also carried signs of their Afro-Caribbean identities, often sporting large Afro hairstyles and an aptitude for self-reinvention while simultaneously articulating a particular femininity as part of a widely contested and ambiguous cultural performance.

The exhibition’s curator, Renée Mussai says: “This historical archive offers a unique and fascinating collection of rarely seen photographs that document the ambivalent cultural performance of gendered and raced identities at a particular historical conjuncture. Imbued with an exquisite, revolutionary sensuality and a certain joie de vivre, Raphael Albert’s photographs embody an aura of hedonistic confidence in a new generation of black women coming of age in Britain during the 1970s, fuelled by complex politics of national identity, difference and desire.”

It seems fitting that Raphael Albert’s portfolio, which incontestably embodies Autograph ABP’s raison’être as a cultural promoter, appears in the Rivington Place gallery. Autograph was first established in1988 with the objective of promoting black photography and advocating the inclusion of historically marginalised photographic practices within mainstream cultural institutions. Having gained charitable status in 2007, Autograph has developed as a concept and space, and is now able to provide visibility to an otherwise marginalised community through commissions, publishing projects and various partnerships with institutions. The gallery has worked closely with the photographer’s daughters Vikkie Albert and Susan Ibuanokpe to preserve his extensive collection of negatives and prints; these are currently viewable in the resulting exhibition ‘Miss Black and Beautiful’.

 

Open until 24 September at Autograph ABP, Rivington Place, London, EC2A 3BA

 

Text by Elizabeth Sulis Gear / Images courtesy of Autograph ABP