Ingrid Pollard
Ingrid Pollard was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1953 and moved to England when she was four years old. Since then she has lived in London working as a photographer, printer, media artist and researcher. She is a graduate of the London College of Printing and Derby University. In the 1980s she was part of a group of black British women artists who exhibited their work together in exhibitions like The Thin Black Line at the ICA in 1985. Pollard was also part of significant collaborative ventures between black British photographers, including Polareyes, D-Max and the Association of Black Photographers (now Autograph ABP), of which she was a founding member.
Pollard became interested in photography when she took her father’s box camera on a camping trip. Some of her first photographs were of the sewage works and wood yards along the Lee Valley Canal, taken as part of an O-Level geography project. Pollard defines her work as ‘a social practice concerned with representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens based media.’ Her photographic series such as Pastoral Interlude (1988) and Self Evident (1995) depict black figures in rural landscape settings.
See Pollards work on display at the V&A Museum in London.
Display: 16 February 2015 – 24 May 2015. Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s is a project to increase the number of black British photographers and images of black Britain in the V&A collection. It aims to raise awareness of the contribution of black Britons to British culture and society, as well as to the art of photography.