The following text is an extract from Stuart Hall’s seminal essay ‘Black Narcissus’, written in 1991 for Autograph’s first major exhibition ‘Autoportraits’. As such, it emphasises the very roots of the organisation’s early days. This collection of images are the first commission by Autograph ABP.

The purpose of Autograph, the first association of black photographers in Britain, is to promote and encourage the work of black photographers nationally and internationally. Framed by the explicitly political context, the title of the association must always have seemed surprisingly self-referential. Auto returns the image produced to its maker. It appears to secure photography within its own circle and carries the unmistakable sense of authorship, of personal signature. These self-referring connotations are now compounded in the title of the Association’s first gallery exhibition, Autoportraits.

Why, some people will ask, this narcissistic preoccupation with the self among black cultural practitioners? Does it represent a refusal of social portraiture, a retreat from photographic practice as a public and political activity, to the private and the subjective? Or should it be read as wholly innocent: merely descriptive — a way of thematising a disparate body of existing work for the purpose of exhibition?

Self-portraiture is a recognised photographic genre, as Autograph itself acknowledges: “photographers have always made images of themselves — some directly, some circuitously.” However, the sly word circuitously carries a warning signal. It convinces us that, in viewing the work of these seven black photographers, we should refuse both these interpretations and try to read their images from another direction.

There is nothing circuitous about the extensive use now being made of self-images by contemporary black photographers. It is clearly a part of a wider strategy. Rather than signalling a narcissistic retreat to the safe zone of already constituted self, the strategy here seems to consist of putting the self-image, as it were, for the first time, in the frame, on the line, up for grabs. This is a significant move in the politics and strategies of black representation. It is part of the same contestation, already engaged on other fronts: for example, in relation to the use of the black subject as abstract signifier of black violence; or as the figure of otherness — simultaneously exotic and primitive, victim and villain; or the way the black body has been locked into certain codes of representing black femininity/masculinity, or certain oscillations of power and black sexuality.

In all those discourses, the black figure was the site of the profoundly ambiguous discourses and, simultaneously, of an intolerable splitting and projection which projected them against the play of ambiguity. The strategies of black representation have been deliberately deconstructive: to disturb and subvert the settled relations of identification and recognition across which the power relations of spectatorship constantly plays. Autoportraits seems to signal that the contestation around these contradictory meanings has now moved squarely onto the territories of the self.