London's forgotten beauty queens: Rare photos capture women as they vie for the title of Miss Black And Beautiful pageant in the 1970s
- Photographs of black beauty pageants from the 1970s are on show
- They were taken by Raphael Albert and are being shown in Shoreditch
- The pictures capture a slice of West London life that has been forgotten
Miss World and Miss Universe with their swimsuit rounds and answers about world peace have long been known the world over.
But a new exhibition sheds light on a little known pageant held in London during the 1970s, celebrating London's Afro-Caribbean community.
Photos of Miss Black and Beautiful portraying the beauty queens are being displayed for the first time in London's Shoreditch.
Miss Black & Beautiful Sybil McLean with fellow contestants in Hammersmith Palais in London in 1972
A woman known only as Holley smoulders into the camera as she poses in Blythe Road, Hammersmith, in London in the early 1970s
The pictures, shown at Autograph ABP Gallery, were taken by Raphael Albert, a cultural promoter and photographer of black beauty pageants in West London in the 1960s up until the 1980s.
Albert, who emigrated to Britain from Grenada in 1953, documented hundreds of community events in West London during the era, including the establishment of pageants such as Miss West Indies in Great Britain and Miss Grenada.
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Raphael set up the Miss Black and Beautiful competition to celebrate the global 'Black is Beautiful' aesthetic of the 1970s, which was a period when women of colour found themselves isolated from mainstream British fashion and beauty.
The photos are a snapshot of a bygone era and feature women showcasing Seventies fashions including cut-away swimsuits, halterneck dresses, Afro hair and big hoop earrings.
The men are dapper in three-piece suits with pocket squares and perfectly groomed moustaches.
Unidentified woman posing in swimsuit in London, 1980s. The photos are an unashamed celebration of black womanhood, and feature curves and afros as well as a defiant attitude
An unidentified Miss Black & Beautiful escorted by two men in Hammersmith Palais in London, 1970s. Raphael set up the Miss Black and Beautiful competition to celebrate the global 'Black is Beautiful' aesthetic of the 1970s, which was a period when women of colour found themselves isolated from mainstream British fashion and beauty
One winner, Sybil McLean, who has now retired from a career in HR, recalled her Miss Black and Beautiful win in a packed Hammersmith Palais with an audience of both men and women at the age of just 22 in 1972.
It felt wonderful
Sybil McLean
She told The Guardian: 'It was just something I decided to do. I’d seen it advertised in one of the black newspapers and it was just down the road, so I thought: ‘Why not?’”
Looking back, she brands it, 'an adventure' and says, 'It felt wonderful.'
The gallery says: ‘These pageants offered the opportunity to create a distinct space for Afro-Caribbean self-articulation, a wager against invisibility, and more importantly, a site to challenge conventional notions of beauty implicated in the social, cultural and political contexts of the time.'
Raphael studied photography at Ealing Technical College before spending his career documenting life in the Afro-Caribbean community in Hammersmith and Fulham.
He began working for black British newspaper such as West Indian World, where he was introduced to the world of pageants.
Holley modelling statement costume jewellery at Blythe Road, in Hammersmith in London in the early 1970s
Miss Black & Beautiful with fellow contestants in London at the Hammersmith Palais in the 1970s. The exhibition is at Autograph ABP, Rivington Place from now until 24 September 2016
Renée Mussai, the exhibition’s curator, said: ‘Raphael 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 (body) politics of national identity, difference and desire.'
Albert died in 2009. The gallery has been working since then with his daughters to show and preserve his work - and there's now a large portfolio of them stored in their Archive & Research Centre.
The exhibition is at Autograph ABP, Rivington Place from now until 24 September 2016.
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