Joy Gregory

I am immensely proud to finally see my book, ‘Shining Lights,’ become a published reality. In 1987, Araba Mercer and I, supported by Sheba Women’s Press, recognized a void in books showcasing our work and narratives. Decades later, while preparing for a presentation on Maxine Walker’s contemporaries to accompany her 2019 exhibition at Autograph, I discovered that little had changed. Inspired by the presentation of the same name, ‘Shining Lights’ is a love letter born of an ambition to address an absence that has always been a significant chapter in late-twentieth-century British photographic history. Shining Lights is the first critical anthology to bring together the ground-breaking work of Black women photographers active in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, providing a richly illustrated overview of a significant and overlooked chapter in photographic history. Seen through the lens of Britain’s socio-political and cultural contexts, the publication draws on both lived experience and historical investigation to explore the communities, experiments, collaborations, and complexities that defined those decades. This vital publication has finally come to life through a collaboration with MACK and Autograph, with the assistance of Dr. Taous Dahmani, who joined the project in 2022 while working on her PhD. Central to this entire enterprise are the incredible women and their images that grace the pages of this photographic dream. As the old adage goes, ‘If we don’t tell our stories, then they never happened.’ Thank you to all my fellow travellers for sharing your stories and encouraging future generations to dream. Learn more about the journey of bringing this project to life through recent articles and discussions I have had with Dazed, AnOther, and Creative Review. Purchase your copy of Shining Lights through the Autograph or MACK websites, All of which can be found via the link in my bio. Editor - Joy Gregory Associate Editor - @taous_r_dahmani Co-published by @mack_books and @autographabp

I am beyond delighted with the award and deeply honoured to have been  shortlisted with such a magnificent roster of fellow artists. Big up @ain.bailey , @camdenartcentre @imogenstidworthy , @chapterartscentre #christinamackie, @goldsmithscca @beckybeasleyuk @quad_gallery A major new commission for the Whitechapel Gallery will bring together strands from the last twenty years of my practice, extending ongoing research into communities in the Kalahari and the descendants of indigenous and enslaved people in the Caribbean and Americas, tracing linguistic and folkloric connections. During the exhibition, I plan to work directly with local young people from Tower Hamlets’ diverse diasporic communities through a series of creative workshops, as well as to curate a public programme exploring the evolution of photography in London since the 1980s.

Join Somerset House Studios artist and photographer Joy Gregory (@joy_gregory_studio ) for an immersive evening exploring photography through light and analogue process. Create nivea prints in a hands-on workshop led with Lydia Dique, experimenting with light-sensitive materials to see how images emerge through time, touch, and chance. Bring an object, text, or image that reflects your own historical, cultural, or geographical background, translucent or flat items work best! Perfect for photographers, artists & the curious, no experience needed. 🍹 Free drinks & Butch Salads ✨ Free tickets to Sony World Photography Awards 2026 at Somerset House + special display of Joel Meyerowitz 📅 18–30-year-olds only ⏰ Sign-ups close 10am Wed 18 March Step Inside, Think Outside

This weekend is the final chance to see Catching Flies with Honey at Whitechapel Gallery, which closes this Sunday, 1 March at 6pm. I wanted to spotlight three photographic processes featured in the show: Kallitype, Cyanotype and Salt Print.  Images 1–5: 
The Honeymoon Project (1991–1995) began as a single Kallitype print that I made while teaching at Staffordshire Polytechnic. Kallitype is a nineteenth-century photographic process that uses an iron-silver solution to produce warm, subtly toned images. It lends the work a distinctive softness and delicacy. Over five years, the project grew into a suite of small-scale, emotionally charged scenes — delicate, often indistinct images that verge on abstraction and evoke longing, disappointment and vulnerability.  Images 6–9: 
Girl Thing (2002–2005) explores the construction of femininity through objects laden with cultural expectation: silk bras, corsets and a delicate handkerchief. I created these accessories as still life using cyanotype, a nineteenth-century photographic process in which light-sensitive paper is exposed to sunlight and developed in water, leaving behind a ghostly, X-ray-like deep blue image. In Girl Thing, I reflect on how objects carry social and political weight, their meanings extending far beyond their material form. Here, the trappings of femininity become symbols through which narratives of nurture, obedience and appearance are inscribed and reinforced.  (Caption continued in comments)

Fierce and Fearless is a textile installation that celebrates women as central figures in folklore, myth, and legend. Commissioned by the William Morris Gallery for its 2022 exhibition The Legend of King Arthur: A Pre-Raphaelite Love Story, the work proposes an alternative to Arthur’s all-male Round Table and questions the role of women in traditional storytelling. The printed and embroidered textile takes the form of a tent illustrated with stories in which women are fierce protagonists. Some characters may be familiar, such as Kali, theHindu goddess of time and death, often depicted with multiple arms and her tongue extended; or Mami Wata, an African water spirit associated with much of the continent and the African Atlantic diaspora. She is not dissimilar to the Moura Encantada, a half-woman,half-mermaid figure from the folklore of Portugal and Galicia, both seductive and magical. In ‘I’m Tipingee’, a Haitian folktale, a young girl named Tipingee is given away by her stepmother but escapes her captor by asking the other girls in town to disguise themselves as her—an act of collective resistance and unity. These are courageous heroines who challenge difficult circumstances and the status quo.The work invites interaction: step inside, read, share stories, and explore the imagery. Images 1-7 and 11-12 Credit: ©Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood) Joy Gregory, Fierce and Fearless, 2022, Installation photo, Whitechapel Gallery. Structural design of Fierce and Fearless: Joana Rosa Architectures.

Freelands Awards 2026 | Meet the Judges: Joy Gregory (@joy_gregory_studio ) Joy Gregory is an award-winning artist specialising in photography who is known for her work concerning issues of identity politics and ‘beauty’ culture. A graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, she has worked and exhibited widely both in the UK and internationally, participating in numerous biennales and festivals. Her work is featured in both private and public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum (@vamuseum ), UK Government Art Collection (@govartcol ), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (@instituteofmodernart ) and Yale University, New Haven (@yaleartgallery ). In 2023 the Whitechapel Gallery (@whitechapelgallery ) was the winner of the previous iteration of the Freelands Award for a solo exhibition presenting the work of Joy Gregory. Her major retrospective ‘Catching Flies with Honey’ opened at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in October 2025 and is accompanied by a publication of the same name. 🏆 The Freelands Awards champion art education with an annual £100k prize awarded to three UK visual art organisations for their commitment to art education 🔗 Visit freelandsfoundation.co.uk/engage/apply for full details, including eligibility criteria, key dates and applications forms 📅 Deadline to apply: midday, 24 March 2026

For over two decades, I have been engaged in an ongoing artistic and personal journey with the Kalahari Desert and the San people who live there. At its heart is my work on N|uu – one of the world’s oldest languages, known for its distinctive click consonants–and my relationships with the last remaining speakers and their descendants. My interest in language endangerment began in the late 1990s while researching in the Caribbean for my project ‘Memory and Skin’. A NESTA Fellowship in 2002 gave me the freedom to explore how languages disappear, and how language connects to both identity and place. A pivotal moment came at a conference on endangered languages in Western Australia, where I learned of N|uu’s erasure under apartheid: declared extinct in 1974, it was later revived as evidence in a landmark 1991 land rights case. My first visit to the Kalahari in 2004 brought me into contact with the last eight speakers, including sisters Ouma |Una and Ouma Khies, who endured the 1936 Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg where they were exhibited as anthropological specimens. Over many years, I returned, building trust and gathering photographs, stories, sounds, and plants through a process of exchange and collaboration. I remain acutely aware of the complexities of representation, and acknowledge my responsibility in portraying lives and histories that have too often been misrepresented or silenced. Slide 7 image Credit: ©Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood)

✨ Acquisition announcement ✨ The Arts Council Collection is thrilled to welcome Joy Gregory into the collection with Autoportrait (1989–90). The series depicts fragments of Gregory’s upper body, face, and hands, playfully moving in and out of the frame. Through an intimate, close-up confrontation with the camera, she explores ideas of beauty, femininity, and the politics of representation. Gregory says of this work, “Autoportrait was my response to the invisibility, beyond the exotic, of black women in British fashion and beauty images. Among all the self-portraits I’ve made, it’s the only series in which the body alone is its focus. The intention is to conjure up the mood of the catwalk – all fantasy and glamour – a world from which me and my kind had been almost totally excluded. The sub-Saharan black woman of the photographs, with her broad nose, large eyes and lips, is the distant, glamorous figure of unattainable beauty." Joy Gregory’s solo exhibition #CatchingFliesWithHoney runs until 1 March at Whitechapel Gallery. 📸: Joy Gregory, Autoportrait, 1989-90, © the artist

Join us in welcoming @joy_gregory_studio as one of our newest Somerset House Studios resident artists! Her practice is concerned with social and political issues with particular reference to history and cultural differences in contemporary society. As a photographer, she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her the time and the freedom to research for a major piece around language endangerment. The first of this series was the video piece Gomera, which premiered at the Sydney Biennale in May 2010.

‘Memory and Skin’ is an immersive installation that weaves together photography, sound, objects, text, and film to explore the intertwined legacies of the Caribbean and Europe. The work grows from my own heritage as the child of Jamaican immigrants, and from my travels across the Caribbean archipelago. This is a region shaped by centuries of forced migration, trade, and cultural exchange. I use it as a lens to examine multiple – and at times contradictory – layers of identity. The Caribbean as exotic paradise, site of exploitation, and source of deep cultural connection.    Portraits and lush landscapes evoke both the rhythms of everyday life and an enduring sense of place. ‘Cabinets of curiosity’ display shells, leaves, liquor bottles, and colonial relics, recalling the routes by which Caribbean culture first entered the European imagination – through trade, science, and empire.    ‘Proella - Tradition on the Ile d’Ouessant’ On the island of Ouessant when a member of a family was lost at sea friends and relatives would gather at the man’s home to pray and keep watch over a small wax cross that represented him. The sad vigil lasted all night. The next day, during the funeral service, the cross was placed in a reliquary in the church. Later, at a major ceremony, it was transferred to a mausoleum in the cemetery, where the crosses of all those lost at sea were assembled. These small crosses are called proella, a word meaning “the homecoming of souls.”  This custom was observed until 1962.  Images 1-4 and 13,14 ©Razvi Adam - Joy Gregory, Memory and Skin, 1998. Installation photography, Whitechapel Gallery. Images 5 and 6 © Above Ground Studio (Matt Greenwood)

Join us at Whitechapel Gallery for Joy Gregory Selects... a film programme I have curated to accompany ‘Catching Flies with Honey’. This is a free daily programme at the gallery, open for the remainder of the show and ending on the 1st of March 2026. These films resonate with themes in my own work: home, belonging, representation, and cultural memory. Moving between the personal and the global, the films reflect on family, migration, exile, everyday life, -the overlooked and rarely represented.  What unites them is a shared attentiveness, a commitment to looking and listening. Whether through the intimacy of domestic life or the resonance of sound systems and communal ritual, these films demonstrate the power of observation in connecting the past to the present, memory to place.   🎥Programme  11.15am Radiola de Promessa (2025), Gê Viana, 13m 07s  11.30am Secrets and Lies (1996), Dir. Mike Leigh, 2h 22m  13:55/18:20* From the Window of My Room (2004), Cao Guimarães, 5m 21s  14:05 / 18:30* Mississippi Masala (1991), Dir. Mira Nair, 1h 58m  16:05 Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024), Dir. Raoul Peck, 1h 46m  *Thursday evenings only  Please note that on occasion, when there are other events in the Assembly Room, films may be screened in the Zilkha Auditorium and Studio.

❤️ Phenomenal @joy_gregory_studio @whitechapelgallery - a wonderful retrospective of Joy’s illustrious career and a poignant meditation on identity and belonging - open for a couple more weeks, do rush to see it! Many thanks @tjboulting for arranging such a wonderful gathering! #contemporaryart #photography