BLACK CHRONICLES, photography, race and difference in Victorian Britain

304pp., 4to., illus., hardback, Thames & Hudson & Autograph, London, 2025

ISBN: 9780500026618

Introduction and texts by Renée Mussai. Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Texts by Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Caroline Bressey, Lola Jaye, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Val Wilmer. Afterword by Mark Sealy. 

Includes more than 300 photographic portraits of Black people made in British studios from the 1850s to early 1900s. The images are reproduced from private and public archives including the Hulton Archive's London Stereoscopic Company collection, National Portrait Gallery, and Royal Collection Trust. 

"A deeply researched volume containing the most extensive gathering of images of Black people in 19th Century England [and] a noble enterprise… Black Chronicles is not a typical photobook: it is an invitation to explore and to reengage this history. In these pages we may never know the names and the stories behind these portraits - many of which are striking - but in spending time with these images we can help retrieve the past, and perhaps remember what has shaped us." Art Photo Collector

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, 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 artist monographs.