Photographer and visual artist Joy Gregory is set to showcase more than 250 works spanning her decades-long career at a major retrospective opening this October at London's Whitechapel Gallery. The 65-year-old artist will debut a groundbreaking new commission that has taken her two decades to complete, focusing on endangered languages and involving a single community and family she has worked with since 2003.
"A lot of people that I worked with on it have died, and they expected something to happen eventually, so it was important to have some sort of object to show to the community," Gregory explained about her long-term project. The new piece represents research she began in 2003 on endangered languages, highlighting her commitment to documenting cultural memory and linguistic traditions.
Gregory's artistic journey began during her time at the Royal College of Art in the 1980s, where she was one of the few Black students. Her early career was marked by a defining moment when artist and Black Art Group founder Keith Piper invited her to submit work for a Black photography exhibition. Despite Piper's enthusiasm for her work exploring themes of colonialism, beauty, gender, and race, the exhibition organizers rejected her submission, claiming it "wasn't Black enough" because she was "basically taking pictures of flowers."
"You have to recognize the political climate at that time around practice and making a mark," Gregory reflected. "For me, you have the right to make whatever work you want. By shutting down what can and cannot be, you start to censor yourself. I was a bit pissed off, thinking: why should you pander to what people think you should be and sit within the box that they've created?"
Born in Bicester, England, in 1959 to Jamaican parents, Gregory showed artistic talent from an early age. She painted, drew, made clothes, and read at least one book daily. Living near a bindery, she would retrieve discarded books with printing mistakes from dumpsters and read them voraciously. She received her first camera for her 18th birthday, which "cost her family all the money that they ever had."
Gregory gained recognition for her 1990 work "Autoportrait," a series of nine individual black-and-white self-portraits, each uniquely angled. "I think for years people thought that was the only work I had ever made," she noted. However, her body of work spans multiple media, including still life, portraiture, film, and textiles, all exploring identity, cultural memory, and linguistic traditions.
The upcoming retrospective "Catching Flies With Honey" will feature several significant series, including "The Blonde," which examines Eurocentric ideas of beauty, and "Language of Flowers," inspired by Victorian symbolic use of flowers to communicate messages. Gregory's "Memory and Skin" from 1998, her first major commission, explored the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean, reflecting her bicultural upbringing in a Caribbean family in Europe.
"The Blonde" series, created between 1997 and 2010, emerged from Gregory's observation that by 1998, many non-European people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean were adopting blonde hair. "They were turning the notion of what it is to be a blonde on its head," she explained. "Blonde had always been seen as something very European, but it was also about being an object of desire, feeding into the whole Marilyn Monroe thing." The project sparked controversy, with "furious rants on chatrooms about these people betraying their race," but Gregory saw it as people "playing with the idea of being able to choose your identity."
Technical innovation remains central to Gregory's practice. She employs historical photographic techniques like cyanotype and salt printing, emphasizing the importance of process in creating memorable, singular images. "With digital, everything can be absolutely perfect all the time. But I'm interested in the idea of human intervention," Gregory said. "Each one of these prints being unique and not repeatable. The perfection becomes about the human touch."
Gregory's commitment to documenting cultural heritage is evident in "The Handbag Project" (1998-present), featuring handbags she brought back from South Africa and processed using salt printing techniques. For "Language of Flowers" (1992-2004), she used cyanotype because "it was Victorian language and a Victorian process," following in the footsteps of English botanist and photographer Anna Atkins, who used similar techniques to record plant specimens.
Recognized with the prestigious £110,000 Freelands Award in 2023, Gregory's career philosophy remains straightforward: "My aspirations were about making good work." Her retrospective "Catching Flies With Honey" runs at Whitechapel Gallery, London, from October 8 to March 1, offering visitors a comprehensive view of an artist who has consistently challenged boundaries and documented the fragility and permanence of cultural identity.
