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 from the judges of the Hasselblad Prize – awarded to Pollard this year – recognizes Pollard’s lifelong engagement with historical memory and its influence on emerging artists:
She is constantly engaged with colonial history and how it continues to impact society, both in her artistic practice and as a photography educator. Ingrid Pollard has a profound influence on new generations of artists and thinkers.
Pollard is the laureate of the Hasselblad Prize 2024. Recognized as the world’s best photography prize, it provides a prize of SEK 2,000,000 (nearly $2 million), a gold medal and a Hasselblad camera. The awards ceremony takes place on October 11, and an exhibition of Pollard’s work will be inaugurated the same day at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden, along with the publication of a publication on her work.
The Hasselblad is the latest of many awards Pollard has received during her prolific career – including the Freelands Prize, 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 – all of which testify 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 strident nationalism and political resistance to 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 Masters 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 series of artworks such as Pastoral Interlude (1988), The cost of the English The landscape (1989), and Oceans Apart (1989) embody an approach to disrupting the 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 Aparta juxtaposition of sources from historical archives, media, and personal family archives invites the connection between the stories of forced and economic migration, embedded in a collection that features images of Spanish and English colonists, enslaved peoples transported on ships, and photographic footage from the travels of the Windrush generation.
Pollard creates evocative works of art – always inviting critical reflection through compositional arrangement, use of texture and mixed media in ways that enhance the lyrical beauty and power of the work.
Many of Pollard’s photographic techniques show a combination of analog and digital media, while reflecting the influence of her knowledge and experience of printmaking. Through this combination of processes and media, Pollard creates evocative works of art—always inviting critical reflection through compositional arrangement, use of texture, and mixed media in ways that enhance 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 evidence of the expansive way in which Pollard practices dialogue with other arts.
Postcard House (2004), a monograph of Pollard’s work published by Autograph (Association of Black Photographers), includes a photographic portrait of Smartt – part of the series Self evident (1995). Smartt appears dressed as Bilal, the name and character the poet constructs in a poetic rendering of the nameless enslaved buried at Sunderland Point in Lancashire.
Photo series from the 1990s continue to disrupt established portrayals of iconic areas of the English countryside. For example, Wordsworth’s legacy (1992) presents photographic portraits of black pedestrians in the countryside as tourist postcards – in a visual frame that includes an image of the famous English poet William Wordsworth, who is closely associated with the landscape of the Lake District.
This series, as with Pollard’s other artworks, questions and challenges notions of English heritage that exclude racialized Britons and their experiences. The depictions of the British countryside in her work also interrogate and complicate people’s relationships with nature – including, at times, our ‘management’ of it.
In the 2000s and 2010s, Pollard’s photography focuses conceptually on themes of identity and erasure—as in Images of work (2008) and affiliation (2010), which also looks at acts of (re)memory and our relationships with recorded history and archives.
Revisiting and re-engaging past artworks is also a hallmark of Pollard’s practice. For example, a recent job from 2021, Ship Talkuses the iconic ceramic paper boats from Tradewinds / Landfall (2008), where he also collaborated with Smartt.
In 2019, Pollard was also the official photographer for the Globe Theater production Richard IIIcreating stunning photo coverage of the show. As stated on the artist’s website, the show was directed by Adjoa Andoh (perhaps best known as Lady Danbury on Netflix Bridgerton series) and Lynette Linton leading “the first ever company of black women on a major UK stage in a post-Empire reflection on what it means to be British in light of the Windrush anniversary and as we leave the European Union “.
Pollard’s artworks have been part of many historical group exhibitions in the early 1980s – such as Black women’s time now AND Thin black lineboth curated by fellow artist Lubaima Himid – firmly situating her work as part of a critically engaged 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 art world.
Pollard has been included in a number of influential group exhibitions that acknowledge her role as an influential artist from the British Black Arts movement – among them Country Policy (2006), Crossing the Waters (2007), Thin black lines (2011/12).
Hidden Histories, Heritage Stories (1994), view (2003), and Ingrid Pollard: Carbon returns slowly (2022) are some 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 Leverhulme and the British Arts Council, among others. Pollard has taught photography and media art at 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
