Andrew Jackson and Faraz Pourreza Jorshari: Photographer Profiles

Andrew Jackson and Faraz Pourreza Jorshari were billed together on a London photography talk programme on 30 June 2019. This page is not a record of that evening. It introduces Jackson's documentary work on Caribbean migration and family, and then looks at the residencies and public collections that keep projects of that kind alive in Britain.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson is a British photographer whose practice is built around urbanism and the way it intersects with race, class, citizenship and migration. Light Work's profile of Jackson describes him as documenting human existence and the ways social policy has shaped individuals and communities. He holds an MA in Documentary Photography from Newport in Wales, and in 2013 he co-founded Some Cities, a participatory photography organisation based in Birmingham.

From a Small Island

His best known series is From a Small Island. It follows three generations of Caribbean migration to Britain and asks what home and belonging mean once a family has been split across an ocean. The pictures were made in Kingston and Montego Bay in Jamaica and in Dudley in England, and the work draws on his own parents' migration story. A feature on aCurator sets out the structure of the series and its focus on the African diaspora.

The series was commissioned by Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham in connection with the seventieth anniversary year of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, and it was exhibited there. Jackson made the exhibition prints during a residency in Syracuse, New York, in 2018, after winning an Autograph ABP and Light Work international photography residency.

Prints from the series have since entered the UK Government Art Collection, which lists works including The Ship, Ocho Rios, Jamaica as a diptych and Hand #1, Kingston, Jamaica on its artist page for Jackson. Each is from an edition of five. A series that began as a personal account of one family's movement is therefore now held in a collection used to hang art in British government buildings and embassies.

How a long migration project gets made and kept

Work like From a Small Island is slow, and it rarely pays for itself from commissions alone. Three kinds of institution tend to carry it.

• Commissioning venues. A regional arts centre with a budget and a wall can turn a half-finished body of work into a finished one, which is what Midlands Arts Centre did here.
• Residencies. Light Work in Syracuse invites between 12 and 15 artists a year, with a stipend of $7,500, an apartment, round-the-clock access to its facilities and publication in a special edition of Contact Sheet: The Light Work Annual. Resident artists' work also enters the Light Work Collection.
• Partner organisations. Autograph, the charity at Rivington Place in London, has since 1988 promoted photography engaging with race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice. It co-sponsored the residency that produced Jackson's prints.

The seventieth anniversary in 2018 produced a cluster of photographic commissions about Caribbean migration to Britain, and Jackson's was one of them. What separates the stronger examples is that they treat the subject as a continuing family story rather than a historical date. Jackson photographs in both Jamaica and the English West Midlands, which keeps the two ends of the journey in the same body of work instead of presenting arrival in Britain as the whole of it.

Other photographers working on identity, place and inherited memory appear across our speakers index, and the previous talks archive lists the London programmes they appeared on between 2017 and 2020. For the wider set of pages on documentary practice, see the events archive.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, with its venue, or with the photographers written about here. Information on this page comes from the published sources linked above.