PAST EXHIBITION ARCHIVE

Photographs by Horace Ové

2 October 2004 - 4 April 2005
Room 37A

Derek Walcott
by Horace Ové, 2003

This display of twelve newly acquired works celebrates the forty-year career of Horace Ové as photographer and his importance as a chronicler of Black history in Britain. For forty years Ové has recorded leading black figures who have a made a contribution to British history and culture. Subjects from the 1960s include the writers and poets John La Rose, Samuel Selvon, Andrew Salkey and the actress Marsha Hunt with more recent photographs of Isaac Julien, Derek Walcott and Kwame Kwei-Armah.

Born in Trinidad in 1939, Ové is known as one of the leading black filmmakers to emerge in London in the post-war period, achieving world-wide recognition for his feature films Pressure (1976) about growing up in West London in the 1970s. Playing Away (1986) describes the experiences of a Brixton-based cricket team. As well as his film work Ové has been documenting, as a photographer, Britain's black diaspora community, the birth and development of Notting Hill Carnival over 40 years. Uniquely he has chronicled the leading figures emerging from the black community in the fields of art and politics.

This display follows Ové's first comprehensive photographic retrospective shown at Nottingham Castle Museum in May 2004. It was organised together with an accompanying publication Pressure: Photographs by Horace Ové by David A. Bailey and Jim Waters in association with Autograph (Association of Black Photographers).

The opening of this display coincides with Black History Month 2004, which is also marked on the first floor by a display of photographs by Cavendish Morton of the leading cast members of In Dahomey, the first all-black written and performed musical to be shown in London in 1903.

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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 06 October 2008