Ingrid Pollard

Ingrid Pollard (born 1953 in Georgetown, Guyana) is a British artist and photographer. Her work uses portraiture photography and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs such as Britishness or racial difference. Pollard is associated with Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers. She lives and works in London.

In the 1980s Pollard produced a series of photographs of black people in rural landscapes, entitled Pastoral Interludes. The works challenge the way that English culture places black people in cities.

From 2005 to 2007 she curated Tradewinds2007, an international residency exhibition project with an exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands.

She has participated in group exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Pollard has worked as an artist in residence at a number of organisations, including Lee Valley Park Authority, London (1994), Cumbria National Park (1998), Wysing Arts, Cambridge (2000), Chenderit School, Oxfordshire (2008), and Croydon College (2011). She has also held numerous teaching positions and is currently a lecturer in Photography at Kingston University. Pollard is a member of the Mapping Spectral Traces: http://www.mappingspectraltraces.org/ research group.

Pollard was born in Guyana in 1953. When she was three or four years of age, her family moved to United Kingdom, where her father already lived, and Ingrid grew up in London. She has described her youthful awareness of family photographs.

"I do not remember the first time I took a photograph, but I did grow up in a house of family photo-albums and the stories that went with them. My father took lots of pictures for our albums and later I used some of these images in my own work."

Pollard began to make her own pictures using her father's box camera. As a teenager in the late 1960s, she photographed woods and sewage works in the Lee Valley, East London for a school Geography project: a foretaste of her mature photographic work examining the landscape.

...
Wikipedia