"Miss Black and Beautiful" and Raphael Albert's Photography

Raphael Albert (1935-2009) was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada where he struggled to make a living selling his artwork to tourists on the beach. He moved to London in 1953 with an old Kodak camera in his suitcase. There, Albert studied photography at college and worked part-time at Lyons cake factory. After graduating, he worked as a freelance photographer documenting the West Indian communities in London. In 1970, Albert launched the "Miss black and Beautiful" contest, followed by "Miss West Indies in Great Britain", "Miss Teenager of the West Indies in Great Britain", and "Miss Grenada". For thirty years, Albert documented the pageants photographically and commissioned other photographers to shoot them (via and via).

"Albert’s photographs offer a rare insight into an ambiguous cultural performance at a particular historical conjuncture. Most importantly, the photographs in the exhibition offer a rare insight into an ambivalent cultural performance of gendered and raced identities at a particular historical conjuncture. As such, they serve as testament to a profound moment of self-fashioning and collective celebration in London’s pan Afro-Caribbean communities. His images are imbued with an exquisite, revolutionary sensuality and a certain joie de vivre, which I find refreshing and illuminating at the same time. Many of the models in 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 cultural politics of identity, difference and desire."
Renee Mussai

"One could argue that Albert’s photographs offer a counter narrative to dominant photographic moments of the time, such as images of protest with raised fists locked in revolt, and other signs of discrimination and racial turmoil as often seen in the work of black photographers contemporaneous to Albert, such as Neil Kenlock and Armet Francis. Refreshingly, there are no signs of displacement or marginality, nor a sense of alienation in Albert’s portraits–his pageant images offer a different, and perhaps lighter, form of cultural resistance.

But it is equally important to remember that Albert’s photographs of the late 1960s and early 1970s were taken at a time of “No dogs. No blacks. No Irish” in a country irrevocably tainted by Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” anti-immigration speech, delivered only three years after the introduction of the 1965 Race Relations Act, the first legislation passed in the UK to outlaw racial discrimination on the grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins."
Renee Mussai

photographs by Raphael Albert via (1- Miss West Indies in GB contestant at Blythe Road, London, 1970s, 2- Beauty queen posing against alpine backdrop, London, 1970s, 3 - Crowned beauty queen with fellow contestants, London, 1970s, 4 - Beauty queen, London, 1970s) and via