Portraiture in the 90s: Ways of Being Seen

In 1994, the year before Eileen Perrier travelled to Ghana for the first time, the American photographer Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. His award-winning image, The Vulture and the Little Girl, was taken in Ayod, Sudan (now South Sudan) during the country’s second civil war. At that time, images of the famine, degradation and devastation in Sudan dominated the front covers of British newspapers. Throughout the decade, these predominantely black and white documentary images, taken by mostly white, male war photographers, would (with or without intent) come to visually entrench ideas in the West about Africa and the agency and authority of Africans.

Thinking about the wide dissemination and influence of these images at that time, Perrier’s intrepid early steps into photography – and into Africa – give a completely different perspective of the continent, but also an approach to photographing ‘others’. In the series that Perrier made during a visit to Ghana in 1995, aged 19, she remained at a distance from her subjects too – she had never been to Ghana before, and her Ghanaian mother, who accompanied her, hadn’t visited in three decades.

This distance, to me, signals not a cold detachment that separates the real world from that of the photographer, but reverence and respect. During her visit, she photographed elders and peers dressed in finery, from a few feet away. Their surroundings - the front yards of homes and rural scenes - are more exposed compared to the method Perrier would later adopt in her makeshift studio set-ups in salons, homes, or on the street, presenting her subjects against simple, plain-coloured backdrops so that they would be the sole focus.

Unlike many documentary photographers of the time, Perrier saw Ghana in full colour and that is how she photographed it; blinding white sunlight soaking in through windows. Her photographs seem to quiver with emotion – they call to mind the monumental experience of first arriving in a place so mythologised and so misconstrued in the imagination. I think of Malcolm X’s description of his first visit to the continent, arriving for the first time in the spring of 1959, or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ pilgrimage to Dakar last year and his confrontation with the received story about Africa in the West – “a cudgel that is used to beat on us”.¹ I imagine Perrier also seeing herself in the people and things she photographed, a kindling sense of familiarity and of community that would become so integral to her portraiture work over the decades. Prior to her trip, Ghana was familiar to Perrier only through the family photo album – as referenced in one image, featuring a tattered sepia family picture held up by relatives, as proof of the connection between them. This series pinpoints the beginning of Perrier’s interest in portraiture as a tool for solidarity and unity.

I’m equally struck by a quiet sense of awe in the pictures. Perrier seems interested not in looking, but in seeing, and acknowledging that seeing is not the same as understanding. The camera can only offer glimpses; Perrier seems drawn to photographing windows in this early body of work, symbolic perhaps of the camera’s limitations. Perhaps this mode of enquiry also reflects Perrier’s youth or her uncertainty in a foreign place.

It is in this moment that we begin to see other motifs emerging that continue in her later work, showing a photographer thinking not only about photographs, but about how photographs function as images that can tell ‘a thousand small stories’, or are used to conceal such stories by absences. She photographs a poster hanging on the wall; it is a modern version of William Holman Hunt’s famous allegorical painting, The Light of the World, depicting a white Jesus knocking on a door. She also notices a bottle of Cussons baby powder left in a window, featuring a smiling white baby advertising its promise of gentle care. This fascination with cosmetic products and packaging would evolve into collecting hair and beauty products in the UK marketed towards Black women, commodifying racism into products selling ideals of whiter skin or straighter hair.

Though the Ghana series has a personal tenor – providing the artist with a way to open up her matrilineage, and her mother’s subsequent journey to a life in London where Perrier was born and raised – they were a pivotal moment in her career and laid the ground for her socially-engaged practice. Back in London, Perrier quickly embarked on Red, Gold and Green (1997), a series of portraits featuring extended family members in their front rooms, directly influenced by her trip. The following year, in 1998, Perrier began her five year documentation of the attendees at the annual Afro Hair and Beauty Show at Alexandra Palace. This was the same year Juergen Teller shot the famous Young Pink Kate, depicting Kate Moss in bed – there is a similar feel in the amped-up flash and raw authenticity, the spontaneous expression of Perrier’s subjects that embodies the attitude not only of the event but of late 1990s neoliberalism more generally.

Yet Perrier’s photos from the Afro Hair and Beauty Show portray people, style and fashion that wasn’t represented in mainstream advertising or fashion magazines, the two most influential and prevalent forms of photography at the time. In 1998, British Vogue only featured one woman of colour on the cover, Naomi Campbell for the January issue. As Perrier has pointed out, there was a gaping void of positive Black British protagonists across visual culture. Her early works could in part be seen as a response to that, though they were seen largely by local audiences at the time they were made.

Perrier herself was looking beyond the mainstream for other sources of inspiration – for example she cites Ten.8 photography magazine which was published quarterly in Birmingham from 1979 until 1993 and was known for its critical stance on social issues. Meanwhile, by 2000, influential London-based youth-oriented magazines like Dazed & Confused and The Face (who Perrier would only work for in 2024, to produce the commission When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years? which opens Perrier’s current exhibition at Autograph) had helped to define and usher in an era of street-cast models and the commodification of underground aesthetics.

At the same time, the decade saw the rise of digital photography, and the heavy use of image manipulation, saturated colour and high contrast lighting in fashion and advertising photography. Any given tabloid or popular women’s magazine on the shelf of the corner shop might tout body shaming of female celebrities. Both socially and sexually we were conditioned by the exotic fantasies of flawless models like Mario Testino, Steven Meisel and Nick Knight, not to mention the voracious objectifying consumption of women’s bodies in lads' mags.

Out of this context, Perrier produced Grace (2000). Using the familiar but unfashionable set up of the annual school photograph, Perrier photographed subjects with diastema – a gap between the upper front teeth. This series includes the last portrait Perrier took of her mother, and notably, features the only self-portrait she has made. Following in the footsteps of Carrie Mae Weems’ first self-portraits of 1975, the nine images that make up Joy Gregory's Autoportrait (commissioned by Autograph, 1989 -1990), and Maxine Walker’s Untitled series (commissioned by Autograph in 1995), Grace presents a personal reckoning with the beauty industry and its unattainable ideals, with a set of gleaming, subversive smiles.

Perrier’s appropriation of the school photograph format in Grace is important, too. To me, it shows an artist looking beyond the traditional references for representation, taking cues from the kind of readily accessed visual culture that most families would have on display at home. Photography is not a democratic medium, but the school photograph is the most democratic and ubiquitous kind of picture there is. Just like in a school picture, everyone is photographed, and in the same way – and the photograph becomes a hallowed emblem to someone, holding the promise of all the possibility of the future.

Tracing the trajectory of Perrier’s practice, it’s remarkable how consistent her interests and visual language have been, even when the majority of her work over the decades has been produced as commissions. While blurring the lines between these two dominant modes – the language of fashion and of documentary, both genres predicated on the importance of being seen – she rarely deviates from the local, or from her non-professional sitters. She remains unwaveringly devoted to using photography to explore notions of acknowledgement, self-acceptance and unity; she works within the domains of the domestic, personal and private and turns them into public statements. As Perrier’s gaze as a young woman becomes the gaze of a young parent, this devotion seems incumbent on Perrier as a seer working in unseen communities.

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¹ Terry Gross, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how oppression can breed oppression in 'The Message', North Country Public Radio website, 1st October 2024.