When Raphael Albert was photographing West London in the '60s and '70s, racist, anti-immigrant tensions ran high. Albert, from the Caribbean island of Granada himself, gravitated toward the West Indian community thriving at the time amidst discrimination, and used his lens to capture celebrations of black communities.
One assignment he had as a freelance photographer was to cover a local Miss Jamaica pageant for the West Indian World. That sparked three decades of photographing London's black beauty pageants and eventually led to him organizing them himself. Now, his work is being displayed in an Autograph ABP exhibit called "Miss Black and Beautiful," launching today.
Every photograph embodies the contemporary "Black Is Beautiful" movement of the time. Women are documented wearing typical beauty pageant smiles, bikinis, and adornments, but also proudly wear afros at a time when Eurocentric beauty ideals reigned.
According to Renée Mussai, curator of the exhibit and head of archive at Autograph ABP, pageants were organized in the Caribbean since the 1930s but in the U.K., there were no contests for black women. Meanwhile in the U.S., there was a "rule number seven" that prevented black women from entering pageants–the first time a black woman competed in Miss America was 1970. Today, even, there have been less than five black Miss Universe winners in over 50 years.
"Not only did the pageants offer the opportunity to create a distinct space for Afro-Caribbean self-articulation-a wager against invisibility, if you will-they also responded to contemporaneous mainstream fashion and lifestyle platforms where black women were largely absent, or at best, marginal," Mussai, who has been working on Albert's archive since 2011, told Artsy.
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