Photographing black Britain: Neil Kenlock & Armet Francis

Our Curating London project is about to move into the borough of North Kensington. We're collecting contemporary objects, images and stories to record how Londoners live in the 21st century. In North Kensington, the Museum of London will collaborate with local youth arts collective FerArts to explore the rich history and identity of this culturally diverse area of London. To mark the occasion, and commemorate Black History Month, we’ve delved into our collections to highlight the work of photographers who documented North Kensington’s black British community, from Charlie Phillips to Roger Mayne.

Neil Kenlock and Armet Francis were two radical figures, who took their cameras onto the streets of North Kensington as part of a wider commitment to documenting the lives of African-Caribbean people across London and beyond. Both Jamaican-born, Francis and Kenlock arrived in Britain as children and became well-established professional photographers.

Kenlock launched his career through advertising and editorial photography, before finding himself at the forefront of black British history and culture. He was the official photographer of the British Black Panther movement in the UK during the late 1960s and 1970s, a press photographer for the West Indian World newspaper, and the co-founder of ROOT lifestyle magazine and Choice FM radio station, both pioneering media outlets catering specifically to a black British audience. From a young age, Kenlock said he realised “there was discrimination and I needed to fight that. I thought everybody should be equal, that things should be fair. There was a way to do that [through photography] without disregarding my own culture.”

Francis had come to photography from an unusual direction. He suffered from an eye condition that forced him to give up the active lifestyle he had originally pursued as a marine cadet and to choose a completely different profession instead. The practice of photography turned out to put the least strain on his eyes. He initially learned the trade as an assistant in a commercial photography studio, going out on commissions to shoot holiday camps, room sets and food. He started working in the booming business of fashion photography in the 1960s. The fashion business was a predominantly white environment and Francis was at first little exposed to the social changes that were pushing ahead the struggle for civil rights. “I realised this is what it’s about now, the Civil Rights movement, the Rastafarian movement. There was no history of black photographers in England. I decided to do black images, to capture how black people perform in a certain vernacular, with certain experiences and history with all its social and political implications.”

Francis’ newfound concern with black British identity in the 1960s shifted his focus in photography as he embarked on two lifelong projects – The Black Triangle: People of the African Diaspora and Children of the Black Triangle – that explore black diasporic communities in Britain, Africa and the Caribbean. Francis subsequently became the first black photographer to have a solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in 1983 and in 1988 he co-founded Autograph ABP (previously known as Association of Black Photographers), which continues to promote the work of artists who deal with issues of identity, representation, rights and justice.

Among a wide range of subjects, Francis photographed the Notting Hill Carnival, an annual event that now attracts hundreds of thousands people. A major showcase of black diasporic music, dance and culture, the Carnival was first organised in 1959 as a ‘Caribbean Carnival’ in St Pancras Town Hall as a direct response to the Notting Hill race riots. “From a photographer’s point of view it’s perfect”, said Francis later, “It is the most influential two days in the black community because of the numbers of people that come together to celebrate, to interact and politic.”

Neil Kenlock, Armet Francis and Charlie Phillips each made significant contributions to British photography, and their pictures capture a post-war moment during which London underwent radical social changes. Their work was shown in our 2005 exhibition Roots to Reckoning: the photography of Armet Francis, Neil Kenlock and Charlie Phillips, after which the museum acquired 90 of their photographs. They still count among the key highlights in our collection. Today, these images continue to help us reflect critically on the unfinished history of racial discrimination and injustice in British society, and to challenge and remake dominant historical and visual narratives.