A leading artist of the contemporary British art scene, the work of Guyanese-British artist Ingrid Pollard has had a major impact and influence on British and Caribbean photography and visual art. An official statement by the judges of the Hasselblad Award — endowed to Pollard this year — recognises Pollard’s vital engagement with historical memory and her impact on emerging artists:
She has consistently engaged with colonial history and how it continues to impact society, both in her artistic practice and as an educator in photography. Ingrid Pollard has a profound impact on younger generations of artists and thinkers.
Pollard is the 2024 Hasselblad Award Laureate. Known as the world’s top photography award, it provides a prize in the sum of 2,000,000 SEK (nearly US$2 million), a gold medal, and a Hasselblad camera. The award ceremony takes place on 11 October, and an exhibition of Pollard’s work will be inaugurated the same day at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden, accompanied by the release of a publication on her work.
The Hasselblad is the latest of many awards Pollard has received through her prolific career — including the Freelands Award, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, a Leverhulme Award, an honorary doctorate from the University of Westminster (she was also nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize), and Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2023 — which all attest to her wide critical acclaim and influential career in the arts.
Born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1953, Pollard moved to London with her family at the age of four. She grew up in an England gripped by both acute nationalism and political resistance towards racial justice and liberation — something Pollard engaged with politically and through her work during the 1970s and 1980s.
She graduated from the London College of Printing in 1988 and completed a Master of Arts in Photographic Studies from Derby University in 1995.
Since the 1980s, Pollard’s photographic work has had a particular critical concern with landscape, memory, and identity. Much of the work from that decade uses portraiture to explore the lives of Black people in the countryside, and issues of migration, diasporic life, and belonging in a rural context.
Early artwork series such as Pastoral Interlude (1988), The Cost of the English Landscape (1989), and Oceans Apart (1989) embody an approach to disrupt myths of the English nation and its countryside — and ideas that these are exclusively white spaces.
In these series, photographs are often accompanied by text, encouraging viewers to question the power of images in constructing narratives. Other times, as in Oceans Apart, a juxtaposition of sources from historic archives, media, and personal family archives invites the connection between histories of forced and economic migration, embedded in an assemblage that displays images of Spanish and English colonists, enslaved peoples transported in ships, and photographic footage from the journeys of the Windrush generation.
Pollard creates evocative artwork — always inviting critical reflection through compositional arrangement, use of texture and mixed media in ways that heighten the lyrical beauty and power of the work
Many of Pollard’s photographic techniques show a combination of analogue and digital media, while reflecting the influence of her printmaking knowledge and experience. Through this combination of processes and media, Pollard creates evocative artwork — always inviting critical reflection through compositional arrangement, use of texture and mixed media in ways that heighten the lyrical beauty and power of the work.
Her collaboration with other artists such as Dorothea Smartt — a British writer and poet of Barbadian heritage — is testament to the expansive way in which Pollard’s practice dialogues with other arts.
Postcards Home (2004), a monograph of Pollard’s work published by Autograph (The Association of Black Photographers), includes a photographic portrait of Smartt — part of the series Self Evident (1995). Smartt appears dressed up as Bilal, the name and character the poet constructs in a poetic rendering of the unnamed enslaved man buried at Sunderland Point in Lancashire.
Photographic series from the 1990s continue to disrupt established portrayals of iconic areas of the English countryside. For example, Wordsworth’s Heritage (1992) presents photographic portraits of Black walkers in the countryside as tourist postcards — in visual framing that includes an image of the famed English poet William Wordsworth, who’s closely associated with the landscape of the Lake District.
This series, as with other artwork by Pollard, queries and challenges notions of English heritage that exclude racialised Britons and their experiences. Depictions of the British countryside in her work also interrogate and complicate humans’ relationship to nature — including, at times, our “management” of it.
In the 2000s and 2010s, Pollard’s photography focuses conceptually on topics of identity and erasure — as in Working Images (2008) and Belonging (2010), which also looks at acts of (re)memory and our relationships to recorded history and archives.
Revisiting and re-engaging past artwork is also a distinctive feature of Pollard’s practice. For example, a recent work from 2021, Ship Talk, makes use of the iconic ceramic paper boats from Tradewinds/Landfall (2008), where she also collaborated with Smartt.
In 2019, Pollard was also the official photographer of the Globe Theatre production of Richard III, creating stunning photographic coverage of the play. As stated on the artist’s website, the play was directed by Adjoa Andoh (perhaps best known as Lady Danbury in the Netflix Bridgerton series) and Lynette Linton leading “the first ever company of women of colour on a major UK stage in a post-Empire reflection of what it means to be British in the light of the Windrush anniversary and as we leave the European Union.”
Pollard’s artwork has been part of many landmark group exhibitions in the early 1980s — such as Black Women Time Now and The Thin Black Line, both curated by fellow artist Lubaima Himid — that firmly situate her work as part of a critically committed visual art tradition of Black British women artists including Himid, Sonya Boyce, and Maud Saulter, who challenged the imposed invisibility of Black women in the British and international artworld.
Pollard has been included in a wide number of influential group exhibitions that acknowledge her role as an influential artist from the British Black Arts movement — among them The Politics of Place (2006), Crossing Waters (2007), Thin Black Lines (2011/12).
Hidden Histories, Heritage Stories (1994), Points of View (2003), and Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) are a few of the many solo exhibitions of Pollard’s work that reflect the varied and layered nature of her art — which also forms part of the permanent collections of public art institutions such as the Tate, the Albert Museum, and The Arts Council Collection (UK).
Her work as a researcher is equally extensive, and has been funded by prestigious awards from the Leverhulme and the British Arts Council, among others. Pollard has taught photography and media art in universities across the UK including Goldsmiths (University of London), the Yale Center for British Art, London South Bank University, and is currently a lecturer in photography at Kingston University. n