Artist and photographer Joy Gregory is making waves with her comprehensive retrospective "Catching Flies with Honey" at London's Whitechapel Gallery, showcasing decades of work that challenges power structures, representation, and cultural memory through what she calls a "seductive act of seeing." The exhibition, running until March 1, 2026, presents Gregory as an undersung force in contemporary photography whose strategic use of beauty serves as a method to engage viewers with difficult subjects.
Gregory's approach draws inspiration from writer and academic Christina Sharpe's essay "Beauty Is a Method," which explores how beauty can break open possibilities and create new worlds. "If you make work that is very beautiful that people want to look at, you can work with some very difficult subjects that the viewer may disagree with, but will engage with it regardless, due to its aesthetic value," Gregory explains. "I think that's a seduction in itself."
The exhibition's title comes from a proverb Gregory's mother often repeated: "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar." This philosophy permeates Gregory's work, where visual seduction becomes a tool for deeper engagement. Her interest in beauty extends beyond surface aesthetics to the physical creation process itself, involving laborious techniques like cyanotypes, salt-printing, and hours spent in darkrooms.
"I've always been really interested in the materiality of photography, and thinking of photographs as objects rather than just as images, because the substance the image exists on can be just as crucial as the image itself," Gregory notes. When using Victorian processes like cyanotypes or Liquid Light, she employs different types of paper that "imbue the photographs with different emotions and feelings that make them into these really beautiful and precious objects."
Gregory's early work directly confronts beauty and femininity through racially and gender-conscious analysis. Her most recognizable series, "Autoportrait" (1990), features nine black and white self-portraits where she poses with clear intention – sometimes peering over her shoulder, looking directly at the lens, or showing only her earlobe adorned with a dangling pendant earring. This series responds to the absence of Black women in British fashion imagery that surrounded her during her youth.
Growing up as a Black woman in 1970s Buckinghamshire among white families, Gregory found fashion and beauty to be more than superficial concerns – they became spaces for dreaming and self-discovery. "Young people are obsessed with fashion and style because they want attention and to be noticed, but conform to some extent so they do not stand out massively," she reflects. "I spent most of my youth utterly obsessed with those magazines and with fashion. So much of my work is interested in these themes of fashioning oneself and how that plays with identity and even notions of race."
This fascination manifests in projects like "Cinderella Tours Europe" (1997-2001), "Objects of Beauty" (1992-1995), and "Girl Thing" (2002-2004). In the latter, pearls, silk scarves, bathing suits, and chiffon blouses are displayed as cyanotypes encased in glass-like surfaces, literally reflecting how femininity operates as performance bound up in objects rather than something innate.
Gregory's 13-year project "The Blonde" (1997-2010) continues this exploration through multiple mediums. The installation includes a 1998 film titled "The Fairest," photographs of blonde subjects, and a vitrine displaying images of Gregory selling blonde memorabilia at Brixton Market, among other ephemera. She wanted to "collide the world of politics and fashion together," using the archetypal blonde figure to question racialized ideas of beauty.
The exhibition's second half reveals a significant shift in Gregory's practice toward performance, sound, and moving image. These later works, emerging from years of research, address indigeneity in South Africa, language loss, and the fractured relationship between the Caribbean and Europe. "Seeds of Empire" (2021) exemplifies this evolution, using moving image, text, and sound created with composer Philip Miller to critique the scientific exploration and collecting that founded institutions like the British Museum.
"Seeds of Empire was at least ten years in the making, and it started with me being invited to be a part of a research group that was looking at the collections in the British Museum, British Library and the Natural History Museum," Gregory explains. "There was this expectation that I would produce work quickly, but I was dealing with something that doesn't just affect people of color but all of us, because these collections reveal so much about colonialism and who colonized these spaces."
The project involved extensive collaboration and research, with Gregory conducting remote interviews with people who had experienced immigration from Jamaica to the UK, basing the work on just two pieces of text from Hans Sloane's voyage to Jamaica. Both Gregory and Miller spent years studying these texts, demonstrating the artist's commitment to deep understanding of her subjects and their histories.
Gregory's sustained engagement with collaborators and historical contexts is crucial to understanding work that appears poetic, beautiful, and minimalistic at first glance, yet engages with decades-long discourses on race and gender alongside the problematic history of the British Empire. Her retrospective feels more like an ongoing conversation than a definitive survey, offering viewers the opportunity to become entangled in ideas that bubble beneath beautiful surfaces.
"The most important part of putting together this show was going through drawers and bringing things out of attics and public collections, and compiling the archive, because a lot of the work I've made or sometimes forgot I made, I have now realized relates to the work I made later," Gregory reflects. "When you're moving from one job to the next, one project to the next, it's very hard to appreciate your practice for what it is. Seeing all of the work together like that shows how the exhibition is about these connections and how my work is part of an ongoing conversation."
