Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Colin Jones 1936 – 2021
- Medium
- Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 279 × 393 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Gift Eric and Louise Franck London Collection 2016
- Reference
- P14395
Summary
This one of a group of twelve black and white photographs in Tate’s collection from Colin Jones’s series The Black House 1973–6 (Tate P14385–P14396). In 1973 the Sunday Times commissioned Jones to produce illustrations for an article by the journalist Peter Gillman on the Harambee project in Islington titled ‘On the Edge of the Ghetto’. In 1977 the Photographers’ Gallery in London organised an exhibition titled The Black House showing the photographs that Jones had taken in the following years, documenting the same location, 571 Holloway Road. Since this exhibition, the series has been known by that title and has become one of Jones’s best known works.
The house where Jones took these images opened at the beginning of the 1970s and closed within a few years. It was the central location of a community project named Harambee, which was initiated and run by a charismatic Caribbean migrant, Herman Edwards, whom everyone called Brother Herman. The housing project for young black people was located in north London, on the Holloway Road. The hostel was a government-funded housing project which aimed to provide support for disillusioned black adolescents who experienced prejudice, unemployment and problems with the law.
Jones’s photographs are a candid record of everyday life in the house, particularly since he was not himself part of the community he photographed. When visiting, Jones would only take light equipment: a Leica with a Summicron 35mm f/2 lens, no light meter and no artificial lights. Nonetheless, he commented on the difficulties of taking photographs of a small community that felt threatened and afraid, often the object of police raids:
My camera in the house was very intrusive so I wasn’t always able to use it as it could have provoked some situations to turn violent. The problem is that I am white and these people, with all their problems, have very little to lose. Sometimes when I go through the front door I can feel the pressure in the place.
(Colin Jones, in Jones and Phillips 2006, n.p.)
The photographs include intimate portraits of some of the house’s inhabitants, young men and women from the Caribbean community in London. The 1970s were a tumultuous time for the newly forming black diaspora communities in London. This was a period marked by a rise in racial discrimination and the significant growth of the far right National Front movement. Many of the young men who lived in the Harambee house were fascinated by the Black Power movement, as evidenced by the double portrait of two men standing in a doorway, next to a wall graffitied with the words ‘black power’. Even so, the photographs do not only refer to the political and social struggles endured by the Black community. Many are intimate portraits of individuals posing for the camera, as well as double portraits of couples and even of a bride and groom on their wedding day.
This print is signed, stamped and annotated in pencil by the artist; it was formerly in the Eric and Louise Franck Collection, London.
Further reading
Colin Jones and Mike Phillips, The Black House, London 2006.
Elena Crippa
April 2016
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