Autoportraits. By Joy Gregory.

Joy Gregory is a British artist whose series "Autoportraits 1989-1990" consists of nine multiple selves. The series is a response to the lack of visibility of Black women in  the British fashion industry, a lack she noticed when she was a teenager (Sealy 2005:203f).

Aged 13, she started consuming so-called women's magazines which showed how life was to be lived. Gregory dreamt of seeing someone like herself in these magazines and became more and more disappointed since there were hardly Black women shown (Impressions Gallery, n.d.).

As a subject, Gregory occupies different locations within the actual photographic frame; it is as if she is physically and temporally moving through the laboured positionality of the camera’s long, historical, racist resting place. It is an act stating that she refuses to be fixed as a subject. Gregory slides across the frame, entering it and presenting to it however she so chooses. The making of the self-portrait here is a mark of control across the actual exposure and focal length of the photographic moment. It is also a moment that marks for Gregory the end of absence and pacificity. This is done in what appears to be a double act of playfulness and challenge. Nothing in this work is stable. The reading is uncertain because it is Gregory who caresses and controls the camera and the moments of release and capture. She is simultaneously in your face while covering hers. Her eyes, lips, ears, hair and hands, which in one of the frames cover her face, all play a central role in the abstracted notion of the multiple framed selves that she presents to the camera. Within this sequence of images it is as much the object of the camera as a mechanism for recording that comes under scrutiny as the subject that is positioned in front of its lens. The subtle interchange between the subject as photographer and camera as recorder becomes confused for the reader because the work performed by these images leads ultimately to subvert the traditional role that the black woman plays within photography. As representations these images become markers of the individual survival strategies employed by the photographer to disrupt the indexicality of the photographic medium. The subject in this ‘Autoportrait’ series wilfully refuses in an unruly but playful manner to behave in front of the cameras lens. What is ruptured formally here is the unspoken conservative code that demands the visual comfort of centrality of the subject when presented in front of the camera. At work within this photography is the breaking of the orthodoxies of anthropology and fashion photography. In the making of a single portrait through a series of nine fragmented works, all the traditional rules of photography portraiture are subverted. Therefore, as photographs they are a politically and culturally defiant act; they place the questions of gender and race centre stage in the contested field of representational politics in the 1990s. They break with tradition as nothing of what is presented within the sequence of images offers the reader the chance to settle on the idea of a definitive black woman. Within the process of unsettling the viewer, it is the viewer’s subject position that is ‘under threat’ (Burgin 1982, p.150). This photographic work invites the viewer to consider and deconstruct the actual act of seeing the black woman. (Sealy 2005:203f)

 

- Impressions Gallery (n.d.). Joy Gregory. Lost languages and other voices. Exhibition Guide, online.
- Sealy, M. A. (2005). Decolonizing the Camera: Photography in Racial Time. Thesis, Durham University.
- photographs by Joy Gregory via and via and via