Ingrid Pollard, Black Diaspora and the British Landscape

“Look at that landscape. It’s a managed landscape, the trees have been taken away, there are dry stone walls, there are sheep. Everything about it is fabricated for industrial rural use. The barbed wire, the telegraph pole, the tarmac. Stereotypes about Black people are constructed in exactly the same way.”
Ingrid Pollard

Photographs above and below from the series "Self-Evident", "a series of eight portraits of black men and women posed in English countryside scenes. Each of them holds an object associated, with the Afro-Carribean diaspora. These range from tropical flowers and a conch shell to objects with more stereotypical connotations such as fried chicken and watermelon." (V&A)

The British pastoral landscape has been an ongoing fascination. The degree to which black people are made to feel "other" when they appear in the countryside, anywhere in the UK, was explored first in the 1980s, with Pastoral Interlude. (via)

Pastoral Interlude (1982-1987) is, in fact, Pollard's most famous work. In this series of images and texts, she pairs photographs of Black people in rural English environments "with words that sit in uneasy tension with the images", pointing towards histories of empire and slavery with words such as: "I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white" or "searching for sea-shells, waves lap my wellington boots, carrying lost souls of brothers and sisters over the ship side". The texts are no captions, on the contrary, text and image are in opposition.

People immediately say [about Pastoral Interlude]: ‘It’s about alienation. It’s about white landscape, Black people. It’s eerie,’. It gets bashed into whatever shape people want to put it in. People want me to say that I'm alienate because then they can say: 'Oh, I understand that. Black people should be in the Caribbean or Africa, that's where they came from.'
Ingrid Pollard

"When I left my parents, I used to go with friends to the Lake District. I wouldn’t see another black person for a week, and you would notice. It was hard. My white friends would be going to relax, and it would create anxiety for me. I appreciate the countryside, but it wasn’t particularly relaxing. I just wanted to do something about that. 
In England there’s a very specific way of viewing the rural, with land ownership, and the colonial aspect of Britain where they went around clearing land. It’s a long, complicated history. People later came from overseas seeking opportunity in England, but it’s the repercussions of colonialism, and the way it has affected particular countries, that people are feeling now. 
It has changed over time—there are a number of organisations encouraging black people to visit the countryside, and the National Trust are using pictures of black people in their properties. Things are changing slowly, and it’s never quick enough. My work came out of that, but I was looking at very specific areas like Cumbria, not just the general countryside. It’s still very relevant."
Ingrid Pollard

I was working as a screen printer as well as doing photography, and I was working with a number of people. The politics were very different, with Thatcher in power, and it definitely impacted me. I didn’t come from a middle class route of going straight from school to university. I had ten years between school and getting to university. I was a cleaner, a gardener and I was unemployed for a while. My parents were immigrants, and I was dyslexic. I didn’t know anyone who was an artist, so I didn’t think about that as a career. Being an artist is about resilience, but that starts from age eleven. It wasn’t my route.
Ingrid Pollard

At school they had low expectations of black kids, and I didn’t have any black teachers—even in terms of just setting an example. That makes an impression.
Ingrid Pollard

Ingrid Pollard is a British photographer, media artist and researcher. She became active within the London lesbian scene at a time it was still a "white feminist world", then as part of a Black lesbian breakaway group. The first conference of the Organisation of Women of African and Asican Descent was held, which was, as Pollard says "mind-boggling" since there were "like a thousand Black women here who called themselves feminists". It was out of this social and political context, that she created series such as "Pastoral Interlude" or "The Cost of the English Landscape" (via).

I look at how in terms of representation, in paintings, in prints, how they've represented black people outside those metropolitan areas– or in the rural areas. You think of the industrial revolution, the 1800s, that was a splitting point for the majority of people who stopped being in the rural areas. They came to be in the metropolitan areas. The machinery took over in the rural areas, but in cities particularly. When we talk about the rural, I'm thinking about hundreds of years. So it's that about England– who is pictured where doing what in particular pieces of work or who is associated with class, money, land ownership and how that's been represented in paintings.
Ingrid Pollard

Photography was being impacted from the very beginning, how they saw other lands, what reflection was on power, class, etc because there's never one without the other. I'm interested in those binary oppositions– here and there, them and us, before and after. I'm interested in the history of photography– now things suddenly jump into the digital not knowing its relationship to class, discoveries, colonialism, etc.
Ingrid Pollard

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