Black Chronicles

A collection of extraordinary nineteenth-century portraits that radically shift our understanding of the presence and identities of the Black subject in Victorian Britain.

These striking studio portraits, curated and brought together following ten years of research championed by Autograph, constitute the most comprehensive collection of nineteenth-century photography depicting the Black subject in the Victorian era, including some of the earliest known images of Black people photographed in Britain.

The historically marginalized lives of both ordinary and prominent Black figures of African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian, and mixed heritage are seen through a prism of curatorial advocacy and experimental scholarly assemblage. Black Chronicles features high-quality reproductions of plate negatives, cartes de visite, and cabinet cards, many of which were buried deep in various private and public archives including the Hulton Archive's remarkable London Stereoscopic Company collection, unseen for decades. These photographs are linked with imperial and colonial narratives through newly commissioned essays and rare lecture transcripts, in-conversation and text interventions by Caroline Bressey, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Neelika Jayawardane, Lola Jaye, and Rene´e Mussai, and an afterword by Mark Sealy.

Built upon groundbreaking, in-depth new research, Black Chronicles opens up photographic archives to expand and enrich photography's complex cultural histories and subjectivities, offering an essential insight into the visual politics of race, representation, and difference in the Victorian era by addressing this crucial missing chapter.