A [email protected] ARTIST TALK

The other history of photography, encapsulated in the work of Vanley Burke, Neil Kenlock and Charlie Phillips, shares overlapping stories of absence, resistance and emergence that document Black British life since the 1950s. This conversation considers the place of Charlie Phillips’s [email protected] Sussex portraits project, the subject of the First Contact exhibition at Jubilee Library, Brighton (22 May to 4 June 2023), within this longer other history of photography in terms of power, position and consent. Led by Professor Martin Evans the speakers are Jermaine Francis who employs montage to challenge the absence of the Black figure in the English pictorial landscape, Eddie Otchere who is collaborating with Charlie on the [email protected] portraits project and is a co-curator of the First Contact Exhibition and Valerie Kporye who will give a contemporary student perspective on the meaning of these images.


Images © Jermaine Francis Studio


THIS EVENT IS PART OF THE CULTURE CONNEX FESTIVAL SEASON IN COLLABORATION WITH URBANFLO, PACE, BRIGHTON FRINGE, BRIGHTON PRIDE & UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX ([email protected])