Images. London’s Black Beauty Pageants From the 1960’s to the 1990’s.

Black Beauty Pageants, Raphael Albert

From the 1960’s to the 1990’s, Raphael Albert held small black beauty pageants all over London. Albert, a party promoter and photographer created the pageants to celebrate, highlight, and chronicle the unique beauty of black women. Some of his most well known pageants include Miss Black and Beautiful, Miss West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada.

Black Beauty Pageants, Raphael Albert

Raphael Albert: Miss Black and Beautiful is at Rivington Place, a new exhibition at London’s Autograph Gallery, showcases Albert’s work.

In response to contemporaneous mainstream fashion and life-style platforms where black women were largely absent or at best marginal, these competitions celebrated the global ‘Black is Beautiful’ aesthetic of the 1970s in a local context. Together with the obligatory bathing costumes and high heels, contestants often sported large Afro hairstyles, inventing and reinventing themselves on stage while articulating a particular black femininity as part of widely contested cultural performance. These pageants offered the opportunity to create a distinct space for Afro-Caribbean self-articulation, a wager against invisibility, and
importantly, a site to challenge conventional notions of beauty implicated in the social, cultural, and political contexts of the time.

The exhibition’s curator, Renée Mussai says: “This historical archive offers a unique and fascinating collection of rarely seen photographs that document the ambivalent cultural performance of gendered and raced identities at a particular historical conjuncture. Imbued with an exquisite, revolutionary sensuality and a certain joie de vivre, Raphael Albert’s photographs embody an aura of hedonistic confidence in a new generation of black women coming of age in Britain during the 1970s, fuelled by complex (body) politics of national identity, difference and desire.”

Black Beauty Pageants, Raphael Albert

Black Beauty Pageants, Raphael Albert

Raphael Albert: Miss Black and Beautiful opens on July 8th at the Autograph Gallery.