Miss Black and Beautiful: New photography exhibition documents west London’s beauty pageants

Amy Ashenden10 July 2016

A set of photographs documenting the black beauty pageants in seventies west London has gone on display in a new exhibition.

Miss Black and Beautiful is a collection of images of London’s Afro-Caribbean community, by the late photographer Raphael Albert, taken in the 1970s.

Over 60 of Albert’s prints are on display, accumulated from his time as a photographer and also a promoter of black beauty pageants in London, which included Miss West Indies in Great Britain, Miss Black and Beautiful, and Miss Grenada.

Curator Renée Mussai told London Live: “We started working with this archive about five years ago and one of the most astounding moments was to find a box of negatives and uncut film material, which his daughters had deposited with us.

“What we found in that box was thousands of images of black beauty pageants staged in west London in the 1970s, all the way to the early 1990s in fact.

One of the portraits on display: Dancer Holly

“These images show a very different side of beauty pageants – it was a space where black women could celebrate and assert their beauty outside of a mainstream arena, where they were often negated.

“It specifically promotes this 1970s moment, which of course also tied in with the global ‘black is beautiful’ post-civil rights movement in America, and what very few people realise is that Britain had its own black beauty movement.”

The exhibition runs until September 24 at Rivington Place in Shoreditch.

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