A load of Miss Black and Beautifuls are coming to East London
It might not be hot outside, but 50 Miss Black and Beautiful pageant queens are showing off their best assets in Shoreditch this summer…in a new photography exhibition.
The images by Raphael Albert, a cultural promoter and photographer of black beauty pageants in West London during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, have been put on display for the first time at Autograph ABP Gallery.
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.
Miss Black and Beautiful was a competition set up by Albert in order to celebrate the global ‘Black is Beautiful’ aesthetic of the 1970s, during a period when black women found themselves outside the mainstream of British beauty and fashion.
As well as the obligatory swimsuits and heels, expect huge Afros, curves and an air of defiance.
‘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,’ the gallery says.
Albert spent his career documenting life in the Afro-Caribbean community in Hammersmith and Fulham, after studying photography at Ealing Technical College.
Soon after graduating, he worked for British black newspapers such as West Indian World, where he was first introduced to the pageant world.
‘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’, says Renée Mussai, the exhibition’s curator.
Albert died in 2009 and since then, the gallery has been working with two of his daughters to preserve and exhibit his works. Thanks to their collaboration, there’s now a huge portfolio of his works stored in their Archive & Research Centre.
You can catch these beauty queens at Autograph ABP, Rivington Place from now until 24 September 2016.
Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/13/a-load-of-miss-black-and-beautifuls-are-coming-to-east-london-6003605/#ixzz4ENxjUS1s
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