‘Performance outside The Fridge, Brixton, c 1990’ by Ingrid Pollard HonFRPS
Is photography still photography in the 21st century? It’s a question the artist, researcher and photographer Ingrid Pollard HonFRPS ponders sometimes.
“I’m interested in the development of photography,” she says. “Can you still call it photography? Does photography still exist? Because young people say, ‘Oh, I’m a photographer. I also dance and I’m a director of film.’
“Wow, that’s a lot. To say you’re just a photographer … I don’t know if students allow themselves to be that concentrated.”
Pollard has herself been a photographer since the 1980s. Her work has won her the Hasselblad Award and the RPS Centenary Medal, as well as a Turner Prize nomination. She is an artist who engages with both social and visual history, and with the questions of who we are and how our views of the world have been constructed.
Pollard, at 70, is her own self-made creation, a wonderfully feisty figure whose work challenges inherited notions of race and class. She also grapples with the history – and the future – of photography itself.
When she learned to take photographs in the 1980s while working with a feminist printmaking group it was the darkroom she fell in love with – the physical process of making photographs.
‘Valentine's Day, 2018’ by Ingrid Pollard HonFRPS
Digital isn’t nearly as much fun, she says.
“Sitting in front of a computer … Ugh … Just moving your hand. It’s just so different. It makes me not want to do photography, actually. It’s all in your head, rather than being a combination of your head and your body.”
Digital developments “feel very product-led”, she adds, and soon AI will become part of our visual lives, if it hasn’t already.
“And now people can just use their phone, and it goes online and it’s all very fast, fast, fast.”
Pollard’s own work is the opposite. She researches assiduously, exploring visual and historical ideas to get to the themes she wants to explore photographically.
“It’s called research, but it’s really curiosity, especially looking at the hidden histories of women or Black people or people on the edge of society,” she says. “That takes a lot of time because you are digging up and making new research. Sometimes I’m doing research on someone, and you come across something else on the edge of the page and you think, ‘I’ll note that down and I’ll come back.’ And it’s five years later that you can come back to it.
“Things take time.”
In short, Pollard is not interested in instant gratification. Sometimes the best photographs take a while to develop.
Discover more work by Ingrid Pollard HonFRPS in the April-June 2025 issue of the RPS Journal.
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