This book offers an ethnographic and photographic investigation into the complex meanings of living - and living together - in Congo's urban worlds today. The authors, anthropologist Filip De Boeck and photographer Sammy Baloji, take the reader on a tour of specific urban sites in Kinshasa and beyond. They examine how, amid the chaos of a decaying colonial legacy and the unfulfilled promises of neo-liberal futures, certain sites emerge as suturing points where the possibilities of collective urban action and dreams of a shared future continue to be explored.

Filip De Boeck is professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), a research unit of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Sammy Baloji is a visual artist based in Brussels and Lubumbashi. His work has been exhibited internationally and has been published in numerous catalogues and books.

James Barnor, who was born in 1929 in Accra, is a pioneer of Ghanaian photography. This monograph offers a comprehensive survey of a career spanning a remarkable period in history, bridging continents and photographic genres to create a transatlantic narrative marked by his passionate interest in people and cultures.

Barnor began work as a photographer in Accra in 1947 where he set up the Ever Young studio, taking photographs of the local community. He also worked as a photojournalist for the Daily Graphic and the South African anti-apartheid black lifestyle magazine Drum, which led him to London in the 1960s.

Barnor returned to Ghana at the end of the 1960s where he helped open the country’s first colour-processing laboratory. In 1993 he returned to London where he continues to live today. His varied body of photographic work documents the shift towards modern living as experienced by black people in both Africa and Britain. This comprehensive overview of his work was published by Autograph ABP in association with éditions Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris, in 2015. An exhibition of the same name has toured internationally.

Text in English and French.

“Through the medium of portraiture, Barnor’s photographs represent societies in transition: Ghana moving towards its independence and London becoming a cosmopolitan, multicultural metropolis.”
Renée Mussai

EDITED BY

Renée Mussai

ADDITIONAL TEXT BY

Kobena Mercer, Renée Mussai, plus an interview with the artist by Margaret Busby OBE and Francis Hodgson

Lovers’ Rock is a series of portraits created in 1977 at the Lewisham Youth Centre in south London where photographer John Goto taught evening classes. The images remained unseen in Goto’s archive for more than 35 years until one of his former students, photographer Dave Lewis, brought them to the attention of Autograph ABP.

The gentle intimacy of the portraits sits in stark contrast to the social and political upheaval taking place on the streets outside the youth centre. In the mid-1970s the Lewisham and New Cross areas of south London became the locus of intense political activity by extreme Right wing groups. When the National Front announced they were going to march through the area because, as Martin Webster, the NF organiser said, “We believe that the multi-racial society is wrong, is evil and we want to destroy it,” it culminated in the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ where more than 200 people were arrested.

As Professor Paul Gilroy argues in his essay There is Love in the Heart of the City in the book: “Racism always denies individuality to those it subordinates … Here in these images, the photographer … has allowed, even encouraged, his sitters to cultivate the dimensions of individual subjectivity that racism simply cannot accommodate.”

The unselfconscious engagement of the subjects in front of the camera can, in part, be explained by their familiarity with the photographer, who was not much older than the sitters. Goto decided to call the series Lovers’ Rock after a musical sub-genre that grew out of the South London reggae scene during this period.

“Goto's wonderfully engaging portraits offer an important counter narrative to the dominant image of black youth in south London during the mid 1970s which constantly framed them as wildly delinquent.”
Mark Sealy

EDITED BY
Mark Sealy and Renée Mussai

ADDITIONAL TEXT BY

Mark Sealy (Foreword); Lola Young, Baroness Young of Hornsey (Preface); Professor Paul Gilroy; John Goto

The early editions of the ABP Newsletter are available as free pdf downloads. View the details of the indivdual downloads here.

Clicking the download link above will download the first issue as shown in related products below.

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Slavery is illegal but it’s still flourishing all over the world. More than 27 million people are still trapped in one of the oldest and most degrading forms of oppression. This book features newly-commissioned photo essays by eight Magnum photographers – Abbas, Ian Berry, Stuart Franklyn, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Chris Steel-Perkins and Alex Webb - who report back on instances of contemporary global slavery.

Each of the photographers has written an introductory text on their project and Kevin Bales, one of the leading authorities on contemporary slavery and President of the US-based Free the Slaves, contributes an introductory essay. This book explores a range of examples of contemporary slavery, including child labour in Bangladesh, sex slavery from Ukraine to Western Europe and the sexual enslavement of South Korean women by Japanese troops during the Second World War. 

Documenting Disposable People, which was initiated by Autograph ABP in 2005 and supported by Magnum Photo Agency and the Hayward Gallery, shows how the unfortunate emergence of a new kind of slavery is inextricably linked to the 'ascent' of a global economy.

“Slavery in the contemporary world is what it has been since the beginning of human history - the complete control of one person by another. Violence is at the heart of that control, and the aim is profit.”
Kevin Bales

COMMISSIONED PHOTOGRAPHERS

Abbas, Ian Berry, Stuart Franklyn, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Chris Steel-Perkins and Alex Webb

ADDITIONAL TEXT BY

Kevin Bales, Mark Sealy & Roger Malbert

The photographs Rotimi Fani-Kayode made in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst constitute a profound narrative of sexual and cultural difference, seminal in their exploration of the politics of desire, diaspora, displacement, spirituality and the black male body.

Together, they created a photographic world in which the body is the focal point for an exploration of the relationship between erotic fantasy and ancestral spiritual values. Through a strong use of symbolism – often derived from Fani-Kayode’s Nigerian culture – and vigorous use of colour and dramatic lighting, the work addressed many interlinked themes, which are ambiguous and open-ended in their meanings and interpretations. 

Published posthumously in association with Editions Revue Noir, this publication documents Fani-Kayode and Hirst's intensively productive collaborations, which spanned a mere six years from 1983 to 1989, when Fani-Kayode died aged 34. This is a vintage first edition in dual languages with texts in French and English.

“In his artistic project he found the freedom to use the complexity of his experience as a resource with which to embark on a journey into emotional states of being where it is hard to tell where sexuality ends and where spirituality begins.”
Kobena Mercer

EDITED BY

Mark Sealy and Jean Loup Pivin

ADDITIONAL TEXT

Kobena Mercer, Simon Njami, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Alex Hirst, Jean Loup Pivin & Derek Bishton

The photographs collected in this first monograph of Franklyn Rodgers’ work, which covers the period 1997 – 2006, presents a range of his portrait projects which include many Black artists, writers and cultural commentators. At the heart of this work is his desire to redefine portrait photography by making the encounter a space of risk that inspires possibilities

His work is a refreshing return to the black subject within a studio genre, with a unique personal style and vision. His aesthetic is one of beauty, but his definition of beauty goes way beyond what is pleasing to the eye. His images are beautiful because he draws us into the detail of each person and in so doing gives us the opportunity to glimpse something of both their outward appearance and inner voice.

“Whatever the motive for each project, all the portraits are exceptional. Franklyn has an ability to achieve his vision as a creative individual whilst simultaneously giving ‘voice’ to many people he has photographed. You leave his company feeling that you have witnessed a kind of alchemy.”
Maria Amidu

EDITED BY

David A Bailey & Indra Khanna

ADDITIONAL TEXT BY

Maria Amidu

This book is a comprehensive survey of the work of Donald Rodney who, at the time of his death in 1998 aged 36, had produced some of the most engaging, provocative and innovative work by a British artist of his generation. Autograph was granted unique access to the artist’s private archive in the process of researching this publication, including many previously unpublished images. Doublethink presents not only the wide range of art forms he employed but also highlights the ways in which self-portraiture and the body were often conduits for wider social and political narratives. It establishes the legacy of an artist who might otherwise remain overlooked, placing him at the heart of the artistic, social and political contexts in which his work was created. Doublethink, which is edited with an introduction by Richard Hylton, also contains newly-commissioned essays by Eddie Chambers and Virginia Nimarkoh and a preface by Professor Stuart Hall.

“An outstandingly creative member of the generation of ‘Black British’ artists who emerged in the late 1970s . . . If this book succeeds in establishing his work to a proper place of eminence in the history of post-war ‘British’ art, it’s task will have been accomplished.”
Professor Stuart Hall

EDITED BY

Richard Hylton

ADDITIONAL TEXT BY

Professor Stuart Hall, Eddie Chambers & Virginia Nimarkoh

Growing Up Black is a beautifully designed, thought-provoking monograph which documents domestic life in Hackney, East London during the 1960s and 70s.

Morris moved to Hackney with his family when he was four, and began his career as a photographer aged just 11 years old, when one of his images was printed on the front page of the Daily Mirror. He has since photographed some of the most iconic musicians of the past 50 years, including Bob Marley, The Sex Pistols, The Stone Roses, Oasis and Radiohead. A number of his photographs are in the collection at the V&A Museum in London, and a selection of the photos from Growing Up Black are part of the permanent collection at the Hackney Museum.

These images from his extensive archive capture intimate moments within the black community, recording the history of the first generation to call themselves black.

This is also available as a limited edition hardback book with 10" x 12" silver gelatin print signed by Dennis Morris, presented in a hand-finished cloth-covered clam shell case with free UK and international shipping.

“In this selection from his archive, Dennis Morris gives us a beautifully well-judged and eloquent portrait of the black diaspora, frozen at a particular moment in time. It is pregnant with anticipations of what is still to come, infused with future possibilities. We are invited to read these images backwards and forwards. Growing up black in the 1970s, they suggest, was not so much a state of being as a state of becoming.”
Stuart Hall

EDITED BY

Mark Sealy & Renée Mussai

ADDITIONAL TEXT BY

Professor Stuart Hall, Gary Younge, Kobena Mercer, Dennis Morris & Mark Sealy