Thank you so much for the invitation and thank you to everyone who's been involved in this one conference.
I'm really enjoying it. I'm sure everyone is. It's been it's been really fabulous so far.
And hello to everyone who is online. And it's also such a pleasure to be part of this panel.
Joe Spence. And what salzhauer from different generations yet they're both multitask as an activist working class women
who became compelling photographers and both of whom were artists who interrogated time and time again.
The artist self-portrait. Sure. So if you're not familiar with the work of Mosul Ultimate, this is a self portrait of hunched onscreen 2001 2002.
It's large format. Polaroid just born in 1960 to keep the age of 47 in 2008.
She's an artist and writer girl, Scottish and Ghanaian heritage,
and she lived and worked in the UK but travelled extensively and networked internationally throughout her life.
So I'm going to try and share with you here something of Seltzer's engagement with photographic practise,
especially the photographic practise of women of colour.
Between nineteen eighty five, when I think she organised her first photography show at an arts and community venue in central London in 1995,
when she curated a major international photography exhibition, the Glasgow Street Naville Gallery.
Now Cuscus Street level photo works. I'm focussing more on her writing on what I call her discursive, curating curatorial concepts,
the photographers that she worked with, who she curated time and time again.
And I'm looking also to work with in photography and with photography in those terms.
And I'll touch a little bit on her practise as a photographer. So that's what I'm hoping to do today.
So it's 30 years this year since her lump of passion discourses on Black Women's Creativity was published in 1990.
And I'm taking fashion as a kind of pivot point across her critical decade between the
artistic activism called Blackhearts movement of the 1980s and what would southward,
optimistically call the more radical 90s. My subtitle comes from the preface to Passion, in which she explains,
discourse is a primary tool against the weapon used to marginalise and ride out its contribution.
She who writes her story rewrites history. There's much more that can be said about what follows.
And that's the case across all the studies of her work. So much more research that needs to be done.
So much more analysis and much more thinking. I'm indebted in my thinking to churn on another career.
Catherine Grant the request and You Need Passion is the first book to document and showcase
a wide range of artistic work and creative practise of contemporary women of colour.
That's more, Insulter wrote. Passion included stunning new essays on what she called The Politics of Creativity and representation included poems,
features on performance music, hair braiding and gardening. Long statements by artists, rightists and performance.
A section of portfolio portfolios of artists, including photographer Parachini Kemper,
do also showed that this was various other artists that she would go into work with a lot.
Had been working with and documentation on exhibitions, catalogues and reviews.
And it covered a huge range of creativity from childbirth or hair braiding to final music performance and writing while images Cerrado question.
Central to the book is a obviously wonderful series of 24 photographs by Ingrid Pollard, contributors were photographed.
We are Syal, Sadeq Marsing Berman, Nina Edge sisters and some theatre like women.
Scenes of Notting Hill Carnival. Scenes of a feminist book for us.
It's a really lovely portfolio of sea, beautiful photographs, very, very distinctive photographs.
I mean, I think you can see very careful attention to lighting composition,
catching women at a moment of creative energy use of those very special photographs.
Passion and selfless activities across the 1980s were deeply embedded in the discourses and debates of the black arts movement.
I'm sharing here a sample of archival materials included at the exhibition, the places here in 2007 assembled by the backoff sir through.
Letters from different collections. But it just is just a sample of the intense activity that was going on.
And I want to emphasise right at the outset that such as one of many women of colour who
worked across art curating and writing in these years without secure funding or resources,
these women produced books, brochures, leaflets, articles, interviews, posters, essays, artists, pages, magazines, exhibitions, events and catalogues.
They founded, directed and curated an independent arts association's outreach to local communities and community venues.
Unfortunately, assembled archives of what they did.
Sometimes I believed that they were often stored under the bed.
Nubeena Hamid, across this period, became one of the most significant and informed curators on contemporary art practise,
with pioneering shows such as Thin Black Line at the RCA in 1985.
Marlene Smith is exceptionally gifted. Our plans to this long worked as an independent curator.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, she organised exhibitions and directed the Black Art Gallery in North London,
discussing black women in photography in the closing decades of 20th century.
At a token autograph last year, Joey Gregory highlighted the numerous artists that she would have included in her book.
Had she been able to get funding racecourses support to do it.
Sabrina Premji. She took a piece was Gloria do we sakurada you Mona had to Mumtaz currently Roshini Kempler to Jenny McKenzie,
Ingrid Poulard, Monique, Amanda Porter, Mort Metro Tippity and Maxine Walkerville.
We follow Wilma amongst the many working in these decades.
And if we want to give a shout out to let us praise famous women, let's just give that shout out to these women and many more.
Many of them are artists, writers, curators, activists, collaborating, working, networking, sharing,
reaching out all the time that archives personal and institutional thinking of making history.
It's visible. Extraordinary collection in Preston, for instance, provide rich evidence of what would otherwise be lost histories.
Faced with a white establishment that continually and systematically marginalised and devalued their art,
all these activities were as originally followed.
Clayton identifies in her pitch Deep Onyx exhibition strategies and I quote,
part of a strategy of self-reliance in a context where black artists were not well supported by institutions.
Assessing black feminist writings of the 1980s,
Joan and Amanto has analysed the extensive use of first person narratives to testify to individual political and institutional experience to connect.
As she puts it, I quote from UNin Menta. The autobiographical, The Discursive and the historical in her mapping of a history of flat British feminism.
She proposes what she calls textual braiding. And I think this is some relief.
I mean, this is what's really, really important article.
When I was thinking about how the writing was shaped, how it was written, and that her mother's attention to the first person,
the use of ie the use of we the use of our kind of creating a community in the writing and thinking about who might be in that community,
the use of you continually shuttling across conversations where women are talking to each other about the need for things to be done.
That's a really, really kind of way of writing, which is very important.
I think she's identified and I also found helpful concept of braiding in recognising
the interweaving between the many strands of creative practise and activism,
which were necessarily just simply for artistic survival. So whether that's hanging a picture on the wall, kind of very physical, corporeal art.
Designing and making a brochure, writing something, making a piece of work.
This kind of concept of braiding helps to understand, I think, this kind of interdependence of these creative strands.
Passion. The book came out of a project called the Black Women's Creativity Project, which would sell to initiated in 1982,
and she'd come down from London to London, from Glasgow in the late 70s to study London College of Fashion.
She stayed in London for some years after that.
She met with collaborated with Ingrid Poulard, writing short features published along Pull-Out Powerful Photographs.
And from then on she wrote on photography, media, image film, as well as many other issues in magazines such as Ferid,
feminist dance news, Djenne and photography magazines such as 10 eight.
And we don't yet have a full bibliography. So much more to be discovered.
And even the archives at the British Library of the Digitisation is buried yet hold all sorts of contributions to spare rib.
I haven't got round to looking at the great Qualys buried in the corner somewhere.
To find out what I heard yet in common with spend. She relied on the power of repetition and I think poetry too.
Thank you very much for signalling the importance of repetition to circulate and recirculate key ideas, concepts and believe.
Again and again, Salta argued for self representation. The urgency of documentation and analysis and understanding and shaping and creating
a legacy for the creative practise of black women artists in the early 1980s.
There's talk of the 1980s, let me sell to them, worked with the Women's Education and Resource Centre,
outlining a project for the Black Women's Creativity and the magazine 10 producing
this poster with its extraordinary listing of black women writers name after name,
often name off to name. I'm sorry, that photograph of the best.
The central image from the poster is from her, one of her own contemporary Agnes works a collage now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery,
which takes its title from her award winning poem as a black woman.
And Marlene Smith's rediscovered these works in there, buried in Birmingham museums.
And we went see them for the exhibition and we just think struck by that headline,
promising writer dies when we were looking at it can but its very powerful poster.
And you can see the kind of intersections that I was talking about, about making a poster and also about making her artwork,
this collage with burnt paper and the way that she is using and picking up media in the contemporary domain,
whether that's newspapers, the black feminist newsletter or a range of different materials.
And also her own poem as a black one, which is excerpted and sort of torn and burnt paper.
In the same year that she organised cheque it out just flat on the bottom of the post here.
But it became a two week festival, a drill hole in London, a celebration of black and Asian women's creativity.
Film, music, theatre readings, lots and lots of different activities over two weeks.
Statement by her on the brochure about the Black Moon's creativity project.
Her favourite quote from Sula by Toni Morrison, which she often cites and recites and circulates in different ways.
You can see the extent of the programme that she organised. What's interesting here is the two exhibitions and the top right.
Of top right? Claudette Johnson. Images of black women and nontax Grinchy women in China.
She organised a third black women's creativity project exhibition, a multimedia group show, and the Finding of War exhibition for this series.
Present the Lord's Passion photographs at Rochdale Art Gallery in 1990 be becoming on a little later to her work with Rochdale Art Gallery.
And I'm just showing two different curatorial presentations here.
One is sort of hang on the work at Rochdale in 1990 and a recent rehang of the work at the places here at Nottingham in 2017.
And you can just see here. But the top right of the image on the bottom right.
Photograph that Ingrid Pollard took of Maud Salter with a workshop at one of her Vahidi photographic exhibitions.
That's a nice synergy there. That one was created to protect.
Had three particular strands and aims to document and assess and analyse wounds,
created a machine to counteract systemic marginalisation and invisibility.
And to assert what it called the power, the revolutionary potential of black women's creativity.
Let's just see that again. Nineteen eighty nine was one hundred and fifty is the anniversary of the invention of photography.
And so to mark this momentous year with her majestic series of photographs of black women creatives out,
this is on the left hand side display of support in the gallery and sampling of this series of nine here.
Now, in the whole series is in the Victorian Albert Museum and bought early on.
I just want to go back to something that Volle was talking about,
the importance of curating and collecting and acquisition policies of Mark with Booth BNA in these years.
He was really a set, simply a terrific collection of contemporary photography.
Also, in 1989, more would sell to herself mark this momentous year with two exhibitions of photography,
one of which included photography, one of which was separate from the exhibition.
And she coedited a special issue of feminist Stults news on photography.
And interestingly, 1989 is the year she's enrolled at her pioneering M.A Ready [INAUDIBLE] assembly.
And Dolfi, then male photography. So the first of her 1989 exhibitions was called Passion, Black Women's Creativity.
The African Diaspora, a mixed media group show that included two photographers, one fled to India, Sambo and Ingrid Pollard.
So are Charlotte. Somebody is a Cameroonian photographer.
There's long been based in Amsterdam. And Ingrid Pull-Out been collaborating with for many years.
By now. Her second exhibition of.
This year. Included. Some scientists call the Foskey Island by African-Americans photographer Gene, which is Sammy Ashe.
Both were staged at the elbow room. In 1989, Levine, a limited setup, the upper room in Vine Yard, South London.
To showcase particularly black women's art and Saltsman, he made a formidable couple in these shearers.
They appeared in each other's art. They curated each other's art.
They worked independently. They worked together.
They coedited a special issue of feminist dance news in 1988 called the title of its exhibition to borrow this title again.
Black Women's Creativity of the African Diaspora. For this issue.
They wrote a joint editorial and this is on the far right as their page together in the closing section of passion.
And so often with couples that it's quite difficult to disentangle later across the spaces of memory.
Nuffin, not with sufficient documentation. Exactly who did what.
So sometimes it could be difficulty in establishing, particularly now mortise died.
What exactly was contributed by both people in the couple?
A part of a couple? Well, with mine, my partner and I often work together.
We both remember things quite differently at different moments. So an image from Jemal to some ashes,
the frisky island is on the cover of this coedited issue on Blackmun's create creativity of the African diaspora,
not greatly admired, which is summary ashes work to she this sorry, this fabulous crow.
Sure. And she did her exhibition. She called it a stunning meditation on plagues.
That frisky island was a series of black and white photographs by which some Yarosh of the
couple speaking black inhabitants of an island situated off the southeast coast of the U.S.
The show starts the death set at the elbow room tour to Derby and then on to street level photo works in Glassco,
then directed by photographer Martin McCullough, who also invited Salter to show up and work on street level.
Interesting that there are some artistic parallels between Moutoussamy Ashes
for Ski Island on the left and Salters first made to put a graphic series,
Sphinx 1987, photographed on a visit to Kunta Kinte Island and can be a river in West Africa in 1986.
By contrast. Which the on the Ashes fortunes of community lie locations and people sing
seems characterised by a deep sense of loss for those who have been murdered,
brutalised and displaced by slavery and the slave trade.
A melancholy and melancholic mourning for do it takes place at the sites of witness.
Sota had included an interview with Jean, some action specialists who she credited with the had been humiliated feminist top news.
And in a coded interview,
Seltzer reflected on the two artists shared interest in the legacies of slavery in photography and transatlantic cultural connexions.
This is the cover on contents of Selter special issue of Feminist Arts News on photography,
which she is Richie coedited with the art historian Jane Beckett, and it's published in 1989.
And it says a special bumper issue has a huge range of different contributions.
Lisa, take now from Barbara Kruger.
Roberta McGraths on feminist theory and photographic practise, discussions of student were current law showcasing the work of two first students.
Karen was then teaching at LCD al-Sisi. Quite a lot of links to LCAC today.
Discussions of private lives.
Public property is a discussion of family photo albums, very similar interests to the work that she has been talking about.
This project by Rhonda Wilson and Nasty Cold Poseurs about photography in Birmingham,
the dental road workshop, darkroom giving community support and community resources for photography.
A huge range of contributors.
Amanda King contributing, for instance, whose one development officer in photography at the Greater London Authority and this year.
So lots and lots of interesting things report on women's on a big photography conference.
So it brings together an extraordinary, interesting range of material.
It features also quite a lot of discussion about Jean, which Sammy Arch.
Viewfinders, Black Women Photographers book is reviewed by what Psalter in the Issues and the
cover image is one of only four known photographs by African-American photographer.
Philomena Roberts depicts an unidentified woman seated with three children and somehow this image when I
since recanted can seem to just speak so much about the importance of documentation and debating the plot.
The work of black women photographers. So, I mean, we know that Philomena Roberts, thanks to the work still of Jean, which somee Irish,
but she was a photographer, but we still have very few known photographs that she attributed to her.
The special issue also included a conversation between which Ash and Selter on the American white American
photographer Francis Benjamin Johnson and her images of black students at the Hampton Institute to Virginia.
In her review of viewfinders, Salta emphasised again, as she had so many times before,
the urgency of networking, the importance of collaboration between black women.
And this hostile world of quota systems to the marginalisation of women is creativity.
We network and maintain communication channels across oceans, continents and time zones.
So almost against the odds. We know what moves are afoot to dam flow.
We negotiated a reign where the path has been forged by our own souls across the continuum, which funds the black diaspora.
And another contribution to this issue. That's also contributed.
She wrote about this is the title, The Nature of Photography Lack Notes from the Underground.
Here she reflected on photography, long histories and engagement with slavery,
pornography, colonial oppression, criminal classification system schooling,
a fiercely forensic analysis of photographies tainted past photographies birth pangs
concurrent with the abolition of slavery and many of the uses to which it was first put.
The start of categorising the other anthropological studies were produced to help
justify the criminal act of slaughter inherent in slavery and its after-effects.
Its current uses include the promotion of female sexual Serbians through the medium of pornography,
the encouragement of consumerism to stay in capitalistic concern,
and the objectification of black people in order to criminalise and then justify the continued whiff of racism endemic in the aftermath of slavery.
Now, she concludes in her final paragraph. Black women have been using cameras ever since they were invented.
I think what she's doing here, too, is I mean, you can see that how alert, attentive, quick she is.
She's reading reading readings. A lot of U.S. and British theory on photography, on the question of representation, merging studies of anthropology.
Shickel uses of photography. The discussions about how photography was used in the prison system to classification to classify criminals.
So she's very much on top of what's going on.
She is extremely well-informed and it's an interesting essay with this very fierce tone as very strong, powerful voice.
I want to pause now for a moment. On the cusp of 1990s this year.
Nineteen eighty nine. Nineteen ninety. Self has a residency at Tate Liverpool, which will produce hysteria.
In his second studio series, The Artist herself, her friends,
confidence and lovers in the studio circle of a fictitious character called Hysteria, who is an artist who goes to study in 19th century Rome.
This series, I think more than any other, is deeply embedded in and addresses the history of photography.
Large scale reprieves of 19th century cop, BBC and portrait photographs and its interrogation of photographies collusion in the invention of hysteria.
A new clinical classification in the late 19th century.
A feminine disorder. A disorder as femininity. This is Selter on the left.
Performative self-portrait as hysteria. Her friends.
Confident and lovers on the top, perhaps, of the studio's circle of hysteria.
Vinnie, I've just put a cart duty seat of Princess Alice and one of the plates from Shockley's Econo Graffy Photographic Dinner us something.
The state organises state Liverpool.
Photography features quite, quite large in a way.
Carrie Mae Weems gives an electrifying presentation on her just completed kitchen table series.
What else is going on in this cusk as 1980 moves to 1990,
sharing alongside more Seltzer's designs for a national postage stamp Blue Gallery, Liverpool.
This is another landmark exhibition created for photography, 150 anniversary exhibitions selected by she leaned toward Druss,
first shown at the photographer's gallery in London in 1989 called Intimate Distance.
And for this show, Schilling selects a range of artists to demonstrating the complex syndicated work by black women artists working for Turker office.
Such Scott workplace Irina Bingy should. But this was Moner her too.
Ingrid Pollard and Maxine Walker. And you can just see on the second photograph alone.
Here, this is the display of work by Ingrid Pollard.
This is from Oceans Apart series now in Tate. The back here is shut up.
This was his infestations. They are in water along this wall.
This Maxi Walker series The Bride and I just put up since so much it's yet and worms panel together.
This is the country. Yes review. Fabulous reviews of the exhibition.
In the early 1990s, Salta curated exhibitions at Rochdale Art Gallery with the progressive, inclusive, radical,
far reaching programme devised by Joe Morgan that made Rochdale one of the most exciting art spaces in the UK.
I think it's important to remember that through the 80s and into the 90s,
some of the most important and exciting contemporary art wasn't seen in London necessarily.
It was seen in galleries outside London. So Rochdale actually was an amazing place to see contemporary art.
Curating exhibition, says Seltzer's seise the opportunity. Sorry, just got to get.
seise the opportunity and resources, including a museum or environment, to select internationally renowned artists.
And these are installation shots on some of the works shown at an exhibition called The Fortune Teller,
which brought together photographs by Karen No from her series Capital Investigating Financial Institutions.
Olivia Schantz still lives. And she'd been told by the beauty shop and they and works by the artist Lorna Citizen.
I think this is just a really fabulous show. You can see Lorna Simpson's work.
These are works by Lorna Simpson, Mike Delana holding and breaking current law here.
Olivia Reshow here. And then we're back to the back wall with lowness citizens again.
NSA seems to be I sensed a certain hesitancy and I'd be really interested if anyone knows the detail on this seems to be one of the
UK first UK based curators to show works by Lorna Simpson in the U.K. The fortune teller included really recent work by Simpson.
Practical joke. Nervous condition.
They know all works, holding and breaking, all from the same year of the show, 1992,
as well as very recent work by Noah and Reshow in the late 1980s, Salta testified that most of the texts available.
To us in Britain have been written by black sisters from the US.
As a curator, she reached out to build transatlantic links with several African-American artists known as Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems.
Betty saw Beverly Buchanan and many others. Selfless exhibitions were often characterised the company with free, stylish exhibition catalogues.
They are historic, Corton attests, elegantly designed, replete with juxtaposed images, information and analysis.
Was it equally well, he says, describe her own artistic practise.
In 1993, the following year, when she's had to print at Manchester Metropolitan University,
she created another exhibition called Borderless Print to showcase a huge range of print techniques and surfaces from computer generated print,
more conventional print etching. And also including photography with a stunning line-up.
You can see some of these. Serrano Betty saw Chris Ophelia, Donald, Rodney, Elizabeth Catlett, Faith Ringgold.
I mean, astonishing. That's just the first list. That's incredible.
Show Serrano is to be verbally or top seed by the curator.
Three. In 1995, Salta curated photo Tonette Genetic reviewing the lens of history commissioned by Martha McCulloch for street level.
Again, she secured a terrific list of exhibitors photo ID, genetic set out to transnational curatorial vision,
forged around the legacies of colonialism and the afterlives of the archive by artists working in an artist working with photography.
Artists working in photography included or shell it, too, in December.
Emily Buchanan, Ingrid Coloured.
These are lower lower left OK to works by Ingrid Pull-Out called Gawde in which the photographs are attached to the inside of a gourd.
And I apologise. These are photographs that I took out of our archives from the year, the exhibition, and they were taken with the wrong films.
They will have this awful plew cost to them. Louvain.
Hey, midsts, Harriet Tubman, Cut-out on the left above and on the right is known as Simpson's contribution of self-possession to from
1990 to those working with photography for inventing family snaps or colonial photographs in their work.
Soniya Boyce's past still a major work about a major work in any history of art.
She ain't holding them up. She's holding on some English rose.
Nineteen eighty six large canvases by ropin Cokey was White-Out series on the interview to fight Maori
woman number five and number six repurpose photographs from the Colonial Archives of New Zealand.
And next to them you can see. My installation shot three outstanding performative self portraits, but Giler woman by Fiona Foley,
which required the following year by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney,
re-enact ethnographic imagery to honour the legacy of Patala people, to celebrate survival and reclaim the artist's history and fish,
and an image for attention and a genetic charolette seltzer's changing concerns into photographic practise.
She moved away in this decade from studio photography and portraiture in the early 1990s.
She photographed African art objects against the plain white ground, mimicking textbook illustrations.
Here she is on the left in New York to show that New York de la.
An exhibition she's showing fetish. College is the circus.
1993 assemble textbooks, illustrations of African masks, hats and figurines with images from Western art, popular media, postcards and photography.
Salties Photography shows her exhibitions of her work. Well, presented in a range of locations, community centres,
venues established by black artists and activists, art galleries and museums, independent galleries.
And in 1999, she set up her own premises. Named to it more than a little irony.
Cold, rich women of Sitrick in Clerkenwell, London, not very far from potential premises.
Well, sells practise as an artist working in which photography was creatively independent, interdependent with her writings and interviews.
The exhibitions and events she organised, the debates and discourses she initiated and sustained in assessing how critical decade 1995 from 1995.
I'd like to return to Jean Animator's concept of Brading to connect the textual individual,
the discursive and the practical highlight the density of connexions between cells, thus making about the making of discourses and debates.
I'll close picking up on a discussion this morning with file about.
The importance of Tony, of artists themselves creating archives,
but the importance of this work, securing its legacy by entering national collections.
I've spoken about how work and BNA very early on support, and I'll close by just celebrating a little love in this awful year, 2020.
Just before Lockdown Mode sells a series of performative self portraits from 2002,
LAPE issue has finally been acquired by Tate by a very pioneering and very dedicated curator who put forward
so slight to say maybe that in this really distressing and challenging year there are one or two good things.
So thank you very much and look forward to the discussion.