A leading figure in the contemporary British art scene, British-Guyanese artist Ingrid Pollard’s work has had a profound impact and influence on photography and visual arts in the UK and the Caribbean. An official statement from the judges of this year’s Hasselblad Prize, which was awarded to Pollard, recognised her significant engagement with historical memory and her influence on emerging artists.
She has consistently engaged with colonial history and its continuing impact on society in both her artistic practice and her photography teaching. Ingrid Pollard is a major influence on younger generations of artists and thinkers.
Pollard is the 2024 Hasselblad Prize Laureate. Recognized as the world’s highest photography award, the prize comes with a cash prize of 2 million Swedish Krona (approximately $2 million USD), a gold medal and a Hasselblad camera. The award ceremony will take place on October 11th, the same day that an exhibition of Pollard’s work will open at the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, and a monograph will be published.
The Hasselblad Award is the latest in a long line of accolades Pollard has received throughout her prolific career, which includes the Freelands Award, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, the Leverholm Prize, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Westminster (nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022) and an MBE in 2023, all testament to her widespread critical acclaim and influential career in the arts world.
Born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1953, Pollard moved to London with her family when she was four years old. She grew up in a Britain gripped by fierce nationalism and political resistance to racial justice and liberation, issues that Pollard addressed both politically and through her work throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
She graduated from the London College of Printing in 1988 and received an MA in Photography from the University of Derby in 1995.
Since the 1980s, Pollard’s photographic work has focused on a particularly critical interest in landscape, memory and identity, and much of his work from that decade uses portraiture to explore issues of rural black life, migration, diaspora and rural belonging.
Early artwork series etc. Pastoral Interlude (1988), Cost of English Landscape (1989), and Across the sea (1989) represents an approach that breaks down myths about the British nation and its countryside, and the idea that it is an exclusively white space.
In these series, the photographs are often accompanied by text, prompting the viewer to question the power of images in constructing narratives. Across the seaThe juxtaposition of materials from historical archives, media and private family archives encourages connections between histories of forced migration and economic migration embedded in an assemblage that displays photographic footage of the journeys of Spanish and British colonists, enslaved people transported by ship, and the Windrush generation.
Pollard creates provocative artwork that always invites critical reflection through her use of composition, texture and mixed media that enhance the lyrical beauty and power of her work.
Many of Pollard’s photographic techniques combine analogue and digital media and reflect the influence of his knowledge and experience of printmaking. This combination of process and media allows Pollard to create evocative artworks, always inviting critical reflection through his compositional arrangement, use of texture and use of mixed media, enhancing the lyrical beauty and power of his work.
Collaborations with other artists, such as Barbadian-British author and poet Dorothea Smart, are testament to Pollard’s work’s extensive dialogue with other arts.
Postcards Home (2004), a collection of Pollard’s work published by Autograph (the Society of Black Photographers), Includes a photographic portrait of Smart — part of a series obvious (1995). Smart appears as Bilal, a name and character invented by the poet to describe an unnamed enslaved man buried at Sunderland Point in Lancashire.
His 1990s photographic series continue to subvert existing depictions of iconic areas of the English countryside. For example: Wordsworth’s Legacy (1992) presents photographic portraits of black people walking through the countryside as tourist postcards, and its visual framework includes an image of the famous English poet William Wordsworth, who has an intimate connection with the Lake District landscape.
This series, like Pollard’s other work, questions and challenges notions of British heritage that exclude racialized British people and their experiences. Her depictions of the English countryside also interrogate and complicate the relationship between humans and nature, including, at times, human “management” of nature.
In the 2000s and 2010s, Pollard’s photography has focused on conceptual themes of identity and erasure. Working image (2008) and Affiliation (2010) also considers the act of (re)memory and its relationship to recorded history and archives.
Revisiting and re-engaging with artworks from the past is also a feature of Pollard’s work. For example, in a recent piece from 2021, The story of the shiputilizes the iconic ceramic paper boat Trade Winds/Landfall (2008), in which he also collaborated with Smart.
In 2019, Pollard also served as the official photographer for the Globe Theatre’s performance. Richard IIIhas produced some fantastic photo coverage of the play, which, as noted on the artist’s website, is directed by Adwoa Andoh (perhaps best known for her role as Lady Danbury on Netflix). Bridgerton series) and Lynette Linton to lead “the first women of colour theatre company on the UK’s main stage, reflecting on what it means to be British in the wake of Windrush Anniversary and Brexit, in a post-empire reflection on what it means to be British”.
Pollard’s work was included in a number of groundbreaking group exhibitions in the early 1980s. Black Women Time now and Thin black linean exhibition curated by fellow artist Lubaima Himid, firmly positions her work as part of a visual arts tradition of critically committed black British women artists, including Himid, Sonia Boyce and Maude Salter, who have challenged the invisibility imposed on black women in the British and international art worlds.
Pollard has participated in a number of influential group exhibitions which recognise her role as an influential artist in the British Black Art Movement. The politics of place (2006), Crossing the Water (2007), Thin black line (2011/12).
Hidden history, stories of heritage (1994), perspective (2003), and Ingrid Pollard: Carbon changes slowly (2022) is just one of many solo exhibitions of Pollard’s work, reflecting the diverse and multi-layered nature of her art. Her work is also included in the permanent collections of public museums such as the Tate, the Albert Museum and the Arts Council Collection (UK).
Her work as a researcher is equally extensive, having received prestigious awards from organisations such as Leverhulme and Arts Council England. Pollard has taught photography and media arts at universities across the UK, including Goldsmiths (University of London), Yale Centre for British Arts and London South Bank University, and is currently Lecturer in Photography at Kingston University. yeah
