Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1961 London, England

Died: 2012 London, England

Biography

Photographer Brenda Agard was born in London, England on 20 August 1961. She studied photography at Kingsway Princeton College and Paddington Technical College and began experimenting with her parent’s Instamatic camera. She later declared: ‘I have been forming images in my mind for as long as I can remember. They have been images that reflect upon the past, present and our future as peoples of Africa’ (Agard 1986, p. 2). Alongside Black photographers including Sunil Gupta, Maxine Walker, Mumtaz Karimjee and Rotimi Fani-Kayode, she was part of the burgeoning Black photography movement of the 1980s, her empowering images expressing the strength and perseverance of Black women. Agard was a member of The Black Photographers Group, founded by artist, curator and BLK Art Group activist, Eddie Chambers, whose aim was ‘the credible insertion of black photography into mainstream art and photographic venues in Britain’ (Chambers’ website). She was also a founding member of Polareyes: A Journal by and about Black Women Working in Photography, alongside diaspora artists including Mumtaz Karimjee and Maxine Walker.

Agard participated in many groundbreaking exhibitions of the time, including The Thin Black Line curated by Lubaina Himid at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, 1985). Agard's work also featured in Himid's Elbow Room exhibition, Unrecorded Truths (1986) and in Testimony, alongside Ingrid Pollard and Maud Sulter, at Camerawork in London and The Pavilion, Leeds (1986). She contributed two photographs to Testimony: Visibility and A Portrait of our Time (dates unknown). In the exhibition catalogue Agard described her works as ‘largely about the recording and documentation of events which our people have been involved in. Why the need to record? It is important that we have records of how it was and how it is. It is important that we have a record that does not distort the truths’ (Agard 1986, p. 2). Portrait of Our Time (UAL archives), which was also printed on the exhibition poster, depicted an unnamed Black woman in a close-up, low-angled portrait. Only her face and upper body were visible, with her hands folded beneath her chin. The woman gazed to the left, as if observing something happening outside the frame, while her right profile faced the camera. Wearing a knitted jumper and a single earring, she appeared like any ordinary woman from the 1980s, deep in thought and attentively watching or listening to someone else. Describing the series Portrait of Our Time (to which this photograph belongs), British-Jamaican photographer Maxine Walker wrote that it presented ‘a multifaceted portrait showing Black women engaged in conversation, thought, song and with their children. From whatever walk of life there is something in this for all Black women’ (Walker 1987, p. 34). According to Gillian Park, the significance of the photograph lay in its portrayal of a Black woman, not as an exotic figure, an object of ethnographic observation or a sexual fantasy. Instead, she was represented as a thinking and listening individual, an active participant. Park added that ‘the struggle to be subject, rather than object of discourse, has been the focus of a particularly intense struggle for black women that is located in the traumatic uprooting and shattering of subjecthood through the histories of enslavement and colonization that is not part of white women’s history’ (Park 2018, p. 228). Agard herself wrote that her strategy of documentation was a response to her belief that ‘Western Society's stereotyped images are how they believe we are—not how we believe we are’. The significance of her work was in providing future generations with an accurate portrayal of Black people, rather than the distorted and misleading representations presented in Western media. She also hoped that through her work, ‘our children will have the true account for us—not just the lies perpetrated by western media’ (Agard 1985, p. 1).

Brenda Agard died in London, England on 29 October 2012. Her work is not currently represented in UK public collections. Although she was actively involved in the Black Arts Movement during the 1980s, her death received little public recognition. In his book Black Artists in British Art: A History from 1950 to the Present Eddie Chambers acknowledged Agard's ‘stellar’ contributions to the movement, but noted that they were later deemed unimportant; he also argued that every time Black artists have made strides towards greater visibility, they have also encountered the emergence of new challenges (Chambers 2014, p. 5). A close friend of painter Claudette Johnson, Agard sat to a number of portraits, of which two are in public collections: Untitled (1987, Tate Collection) and Trilogy: Woman in Red (1982, Arts Council Collection). Agard’s works have not been exhibited since the 1980s. However, in 2017 the poster for Testimony exhibition, featuring her Portrait of Our Time photograph, was displayed in the show The Place is Here at Nottingham Contemporary.