Eugene Palmer and Barbara Walker: Photography and the Black Subject

Eugene Palmer and Barbara Walker offer an interesting conundrum with regard to recent1 historical exhibitions of black British artists. Palmer’s artistic practice dates back to the late 1970s, and despite his involvement in a range of group exhibitions including New Contemporaries (1977), Caribbean Expressions in Britain (1986), Creation for Liberation Open Exhibition Art by Black Artists (1987), and Black Art: Plotting the Course (1988), his important contributions to British art history have been largely overlooked by recent historical exhibitions.2 Walker entered the art world during the mid-to-late-1990s. Two important early exhibitions of her work, Private Face and True Stories, exist outside the period of the 1980s that is currently undergoing significant institutional attention in Britain.3

Palmer and Walker also share some other common ground. Palmer was born in Jamaica in 1955, came to Britain at the age of ten, and grew up in Birmingham, England’s second city. Walker was born in Birmingham in 1964 to Jamaican parents and has lived there all her life. Both Palmer and Walker are painters. By more than mere coincidence, the catalyst for this article was two recent exhibitions of newly commissioned work: Barbara Walker’s Sub Urban: New Drawings and Eugene Palmer’s Didn’t it Rain: New Paintings, both staged at the James Hockey and Foyer Galleries, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, England, in 2015 and 2018, respectively.

In radically different ways Palmer and Walker have made the portrayal of the black figure central to their work. Nevertheless, it is the nexus between figuration and photography, history and representation that is of particular interest here. As will become apparent, the role played by photography in Palmer’s and Walker’s work is quite different. For Palmer, actual photographs, often those derived from the family album or from the public realm, play a central role in his paintings. By comparison, in Walker’s work certain kinds of photography, namely that used to classify and denote truth, its indexical qualities, is relentlessly examined in her compositions.

Deborah Willis explains that “images of the black subject, whether artistic, documentary, or anthropological, are forever fixed in the popular imagination through photography.”4 The brutal mid-nineteenth-century anthropological studio portraits by Joseph T. Zealy of naked or partially dressed former enslaved African American men, women, and children “encourage a discourse that views the black body as inferior and at the same time desirable.”5 Photographers and artists from across the black diaspora have played a long and important role in challenging the formidable and enduring constructs generated by various strains of photography, from pseudoscientific and documentary to media con- structs and the mugshot. Stuart Hall described this work (spanning social documentary, collage, photo- text, computer-generated, and installation) as “producing the black subject, in a variety of radically new positions.”6

Due to advances in technology, particularly those connected to mobile phones, the act of photographing has itself become more ubiquitous than it has ever been. Reflecting on photography, not through the medium itself but through Palmer’s and Walker’s paintings and drawings, offers us an opportunity to adopt a different mode of contemplation of photography and representation. This article explores the influence photography has had in Palmer’s and Walker’s respective approaches to figurative image making. In particular, it considers how both artists speak back, almost inadvertently, to photography (as a prevailing mode of representation) through painting and drawing.7 In Palmer’s painting, the family album has been a notable source and influence. Walker’s earlier portraits of individuals and depictions of the marketplace, community center, and barbershop exude a social documentary feel. However, Walker’s more recent drawings of young black men, and then young black women, are more closely aligned to a critique of black representation as prefigured by photography’s enduring pseudo- scientific legacy. It is fair to say, however, that in both Palmer’s and Walker’s paintings and drawings, such critical positions are not always explicit. This is because in their work we often encounter imagery, which in its articulation is itself about the “language” of drawing and painting, the application of color, the use of line and scale. Palmer’s and Walker’s work challenges photography’s enduring and often problematic relationship to the representation of the black body. Central to significant bodies of Palmer’s work in general, and Didn’t It Rain in particular, is his now familiar use of repetition. Walker’s exhibition Sub Urban comprised a series of large-scale, site-specific wall drawings produced over months that were eventually washed away by the artist at the end of the exhibition.

1 Exhibitions such as No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990, Guildhall Art Gallery, London, July 10, 2015–January 24, 2016, and The Place Is Here, Nottingham Contemporary, February 4–May 1, 2017, and South London Gallery, June 22– September 10, 2017.
2 One caveat to this was the inclusion of Eugene Palmer’s painting Duppy Shadow (1993) in the display Black Art in Focus at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2016.
3 Private Face, Midland Arts Centre, Birmingham, May 25–July 7, 2002, presented Walker’s work covering the period 1998–2002. True Stories, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, September 20–November 15, 2003, featured Vanley Burke, Bharti Parmar, Peter Grego, and Barbara Walker.
4 Deborah Willis, “Counteracting the Stereotype: Photography in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 5, part 1, The Twentieth Century: The Impact of Africa, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), 11
5 Ibid., 13
6 Stuart Hall, Different: A Historical Context (London: Phaidon, 2001), 4.
7 This article focuses primarily on newly commissioned work presented at the James Hockey and Foyer Galleries at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, England: Barbara Walker, Sub Urban: New Drawings, September 1–October 10, 2015; and Eugene Palmer, Didn’t It Rain: New Paintings, January 27–March 24, 2018.

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