Black Chronicles

‘Unites extraordinary rediscovered photographs of Black people from 19th- and 20th-century Britain with details about their lives, countering the archival anonymity of Black Victorian Britons’ - RA Magazine
‘The culmination of an expansive research project, initiated by Autograph, a London-based institution focused on photography’s relation to race and social justice, that reveals Black lives in nineteenth-century Britain through an astonishing array of studio portraits… The design privileges the intensity of gazes between photographers and subjects through outstanding reproduction, which also allows for clothing, jewelry, and hairstyles, and the writing on cartes-de-visite and album pages to be visible with a startling clarity of detail… Mussai’s meticulous biographical notes on numerous sitters are an immense and compelling resource’ - Aperture
‘A carefully composed act of recovery and an archive brought back to life through curatorial obsession, intellectual rigor and a deep ethic of care. What unfolds across its more than 300 pages is not just an exploration of race and photography in Victorian Britain, but a sustained meditation on presence, erasure and the politics of looking… Mussai’s analysis renders these photographs far more than anthropological artifacts. She reads them as active sites of meaning: images that expose not only the aesthetic codes of the period, but the shifting registers of self-fashioning, resistance and diasporic presence… Black Chronicles is a triumph of visual scholarship, a meditation on absence and presence, and a call to rethink who gets remembered and how’ - Musée Magazine
‘Groundbreaking… Challenges the historical erasure of Black British subjects and reframes narratives of race, identity, and colonialism in 19th-century visual culture… The curated images are striking’ - QBR/The Black Book Review

Renée Mussai is an independent curator, writer and scholar of visual culture. Formerly Senior Curator and Head of Collection at Autograph, she is currently Senior Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London, and Chair of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation. Her publications include ‘Eyes That Commit - A Visual Gathering’ (2025), and several award-winning artist monographs.

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