Black Chronicles

Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain

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A collection of extraordinary 19th-century portraits that radically shifts our understanding of the presence and identities of the Black subject in Victorian Britain.

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These striking studio portraits, curated and brought together following ten years of research championed by Autograph, constitute the most comprehensive collection of 19th-century photography depicting the Black subject in the Victorian era, including some of the earliest known images of Black people photographed in Britain.

The historically marginalized lives of both ordinary and prominent Black figures of African, Afro-Caribbean, South Asian and mixed heritage are seen through a prism of curatorial advocacy and experimental scholarly assemblage. Black Chronicles features high quality reproductions of plate negatives, cartes de visite and cabinet cards, many of which were buried deep in various private and public archives including the Hulton Archive’s remarkable London Stereoscopic Company collection, unseen for decades. These photographs are linked with imperial and colonial narratives through newly commissioned essays and rare lecture transcripts, in-conversation and text interventions by Caroline Bressey, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Lola Jaye, Renée Mussai and Val Wilmer, and an afterword by Mark Sealy.

Built upon groundbreaking, in-depth new research, Black Chronicles opens up photographic archives to expand and enrich photography’s complex cultural histories and subjectivities, offering an essential insight into the visual politics of race, representation and difference in the Victorian era by addressing this crucial missing chapter.

Introduction and texts by Renée Musai, Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Text by Paul Gilroy, Text by Stuart Hall, Text by Caroline Bressey, Text by Lola Jaye, Text by M. Neelika Jayawardane, Afterword by Mark Sealy, Text by Val Wilmer

Published by Thames & Hudson in partnership with Autograph.
Extent: 304 pp
Format: PLC (no jacket)
Illustrations: 330
Publication date: 2025-04-29
Size: 29.5 x 24.5 cm
ISBN: 9780500026618

Press Reviews

Unites extraordinary rediscovered photographs of Black people from 19th- and 20th-century Britain with details about their lives, countering the archival anonymity of Black Victorian Britons
RA Magazine

The culmination of an expansive research project, initiated by Autograph, a London-based institution focused on photography’s relation to race and social justice, that reveals Black lives in nineteenth-century Britain through an astonishing array of studio portraits… The design privileges the intensity of gazes between photographers and subjects through outstanding reproduction, which also allows for clothing, jewelry, and hairstyles, and the writing on cartes-de-visite and album pages to be visible with a startling clarity of detail… Mussai’s meticulous biographical notes on numerous sitters are an immense and compelling resource
Aperture

A carefully composed act of recovery and an archive brought back to life through curatorial obsession, intellectual rigor and a deep ethic of care. What unfolds across its more than 300 pages is not just an exploration of race and photography in Victorian Britain, but a sustained meditation on presence, erasure and the politics of looking... Mussai’s analysis renders these photographs far more than anthropological artifacts. She reads them as active sites of meaning: images that expose not only the aesthetic codes of the period, but the shifting registers of self-fashioning, resistance and diasporic presence… Black Chronicles is a triumph of visual scholarship, a meditation on absence and presence, and a call to rethink who gets remembered and how
Musée Magazine

Groundbreaking… Challenges the historical erasure of Black British subjects and reframes narratives of race, identity, and colonialism in 19th-century visual culture… The curated images are striking
QBR/The Black Book Review

About the Authors

Renée Mussai is an independent curator, writer and scholar of visual culture. Formerly Senior Curator and Head of Collection at Autograph, she is currently Senior Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London, and Chair of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation. Her publications include 'Eyes That Commit – A Visual Gathering' (2025), and several award-winning artist monographs.

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