'Valentine Days', 2017
To mark the 30th anniversary of her seminal Pastoral Interludes series, Autograph commissioned Ingrid Pollard in 2017 to hand-tint a set of modern prints made from 19th century postcards of Jamaica.
'In response to the archival photographs on display in Autograph's exhibition Making Jamaica: Photography from the 1890s , we invited artist Ingrid Pollard to apply her signature hand-tinting technique to five large-scale modern prints created from scans of the original postcards by Valentine & Sons. The exhibition explored how a new image of Jamaica was created through photography in the late nineteenth century, featuring historical photographs, lantern slides and stereocards revealing the carefully constructed representation of this transitional period in Jamaica’s history. Pollard's artist commission, The Valentine Days, marked the 30th anniversary of her seminal series Pastoral Interludes, a series of five hand-tinted photographs that depict solitary black figures in the rural English countryside, juxtaposing landscape, portraiture and text.
The works Pollard created for the commission were first displayed in Making Jamaica, and together with a sixth work produced during her Light Work artist residency in 2018, are now part of Autograph's collection of photography.' (Autograph ABP)
Please see the Autograph ABP website for more details of the commission.
'In response to the archival photographs on display in Autograph's exhibition Making Jamaica: Photography from the 1890s , we invited artist Ingrid Pollard to apply her signature hand-tinting technique to five large-scale modern prints created from scans of the original postcards by Valentine & Sons. The exhibition explored how a new image of Jamaica was created through photography in the late nineteenth century, featuring historical photographs, lantern slides and stereocards revealing the carefully constructed representation of this transitional period in Jamaica’s history. Pollard's artist commission, The Valentine Days, marked the 30th anniversary of her seminal series Pastoral Interludes, a series of five hand-tinted photographs that depict solitary black figures in the rural English countryside, juxtaposing landscape, portraiture and text.
The works Pollard created for the commission were first displayed in Making Jamaica, and together with a sixth work produced during her Light Work artist residency in 2018, are now part of Autograph's collection of photography.' (Autograph ABP)
Please see the Autograph ABP website for more details of the commission.
Ingrid Pollard - Catherine Hall:
'The “Valentine photographs” belong to a tradition of representation dating from the colonial period. The British slave-owners who dominated plantation society in Jamaica wanted to establish a picture of the island as beautiful and prosperous, a place to make a fortune and live a good life. They encouraged white settlement and actively countered negative accounts of slavery. Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774), for example, aimed to convince a metropolitan audience that slavery was essential to British prosperity. Long waxed lyrical on the island’s beauties, aestheticizing the landscape, rendering it both familiar and exotic, pastoral and tropical. In the engravings that illustrated Long’s book, the heavy labor associated with sugar production disappeared, reducing the few black figures to tiny dots. Meanwhile, abolitionists circulated reports of cruelty and death on the plantations in their efforts to mobilize popular support for emancipation. Both sides engaged in this war of representation over slavery.' - Catherine Hall
Read the full piece by Hall on the Light Work Collection website here.
'The “Valentine photographs” belong to a tradition of representation dating from the colonial period. The British slave-owners who dominated plantation society in Jamaica wanted to establish a picture of the island as beautiful and prosperous, a place to make a fortune and live a good life. They encouraged white settlement and actively countered negative accounts of slavery. Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774), for example, aimed to convince a metropolitan audience that slavery was essential to British prosperity. Long waxed lyrical on the island’s beauties, aestheticizing the landscape, rendering it both familiar and exotic, pastoral and tropical. In the engravings that illustrated Long’s book, the heavy labor associated with sugar production disappeared, reducing the few black figures to tiny dots. Meanwhile, abolitionists circulated reports of cruelty and death on the plantations in their efforts to mobilize popular support for emancipation. Both sides engaged in this war of representation over slavery.' - Catherine Hall
Read the full piece by Hall on the Light Work Collection website here.