25/03/2024

Ingrid Pollard. Photo by Emile Holba

Leading British contemporary photographer and CREAM PhD alumna, Ingrid Pollard, has been awarded the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation Award for photography. 

Ingrid Pollard uses photography to question engrained social and cultural constructs behind race, identity, community, and gender. Her work reveals subtle and starkly evident injustices through her engagement with the British landscape, iconography, and identity, as well as challenging the medium of photography and its history. Formally her work combines portraiture, found archival material, objects and text to produce complex installations. 

Ingrid Pollard, from the series, Pastoral Interlude (1988)(Collection 5 – Autograph Archive)

Born in Guyana and raised in Britain, Pollard has consistently engaged with colonial history and how it continues to impact society, both in her artistic practice and as an educator in photography. Ingrid Pollard has a profound impact on younger generations of artists and thinkers. Pollard is also associated with Autograph ABP, an international, non-profit, photographic arts agency and the first Black British photographic association in Britain – of which CREAM’s Roshini Kempadoo and PhD alumnus, Sunil Gupta (founding member) were instrumental to establishing the agency.

Ingrid Pollard: 

“Receiving the Hasselblad Award is a great honour. It comes at a point in my life when I’m quite mature and it gives me an opportunity to support younger photographers and researchers, which I intend to do. I wish for the award to extend beyond myself.” 

Ingrid Pollard was awarded a PhD-by-publication by the University of Westminster in 2016. Her work is part of many collections, including the Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum, and the UK Arts Council Collection. In 2016 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2022, she was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize and in 2023, she was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to Art. She has taught photography at Newcastle University, Kingston University, University of Hertfordshire, Croydon College of Art and the University of Wales, Newport, among others. Pollard is presently Millard Professor of Art at Goldsmiths, Department of Art.

Presentation of the award will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden on 11 October 2024 and is accompanied by the opening of an exhibition at the Hasselblad Center, together with a new publication, marking the award and the first solo exhibition of Pollard’s work in Sweden. In conjunction, a seminar will take place in collaboration with the County Administrative Board, and a concert will be held with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Sweden’s national orchestra.

Find out more about the award of the Hasselblad Foundation website.