The full title of this article by Kadish Morris (The Guardian) is “Photographer Joy Gregory on her new project, decades in the making: ‘A lot of people I worked with on it have died.’” Gregory’s solo exhibition “Catching Flies With Honey” will be on view at Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, from 8 October 2025 to 1 March 2026.
Morris writes, “A new retrospective by the Black British artist plays with everything from the Victorians’ use of flowers to Eurocentric beauty standards – including one piece she started in 2003.” Here are excerpts from this compelling article. [Also see our previous post Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey. Many thanks to D.S. Battistoli for bringing this item to our attention.]
There weren’t many Black students at the Royal College of Art when Joy Gregory was a student in the 1980s, but she did study alongside artist and Blk Art Group founder Keith Piper, who was putting together a Black photography exhibition. “He asked me if I would submit some work,” says the 65-year-old artist. Piper had liked her work, which explored themes of colonialism, beauty, gender and race. However, her submission was rejected by the organisers on the basis that it simply wasn’t Black enough. [. . .]
Understanding the capabilities of photography has always been of great importance to Gregory, who was given the £110,000 Freelands award in 2023. It’s a journey that began by experimenting with lots of self-portraits. Her 1990 work Autoportrait is perhaps what she is best known for. It’s a set of nine individual black-and-white self-portraits, each one uniquely angled. “I think for years people thought that was the only work I had ever made,” she says.
Gregory’s body of work spans media ranging from still life to portraiture to film to textiles and explores identity, cultural memory and linguistic traditions. More than 250 of her works will be on display at her retrospective Catching Flies With Honey at London’s Whitechapel Gallery from October. Visitors to the show can expect to see series such as The Blonde, which examines Eurocentric ideas of beauty and Language of Flowers, inspired by the Victorians’ symbolic use of flowers to communicate messages.
She’ll also be debuting a piece that has taken two decades to make. “The new commission, if I ever manage to pull it off, looks at research I’ve been doing since 2003 on endangered languages. I’ve been working with a single community and family for over 20 years. A lot of people that I worked with on it have died, and they expected something to happen eventually, so it was important to have some sort of object to show to the community.”
Born in Bicester in England in 1959 to Jamaican parents, Gregory was creative from a young age. She painted, drew, made clothes and read at least one book a day. “We lived near a bindery, so when the company would throw books out that had mistakes, they would end up in a dumpster and I would pick those books out and sit and read them.” She got her first camera for her 18th birthday, which she says cost her family “all the money that they ever had”.
Gregory’s dreams have always been simple: “My aspirations were about making good work.” Since the early days, she has prioritised innovation. Be it cyanotype or salt printing, photography techniques are as important as the subject matter in creating a memorable, singular image. “With digital, everything can be absolutely perfect all the time. But I’m interested in the idea of human intervention,” says Gregory. “Each one of these prints being unique and not repeatable. The perfection becomes about the human touch.”
Memory and Skin, 1998
“Memory and Skin was the first major commission that I had. It was about exploring the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean. Having grown up in a Caribbean family in Europe, you become bilingual, bicultural. It was about being able to look between the two, [and explore] people’s assumptions about Europe and what they thought of the Caribbean.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/sep/18/joy-gregory-artist-photographer-interview-whitechapel-gallery-london-exhibition
[Photo above by Joy Gregory: “Zara” from the series Fairest, 1999-2010.]