“Don’t be normal. Don’t be normal ever!” Joy Gregory says with a throaty laugh. Known for her boundary-bending photography that tackles weighty subject matter with arresting beauty, the artist has spent 40 years pursuing a creative path that is uniquely her own – and anything but normal. Now, the fruit of that labour will at last be celebrated, as the first major retrospective of her career opens at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Enormously respected among her peers and in the countries where she has had residencies – South Africa, Jamaica and Kenya – Gregory had largely flown under the British radar until a couple of years ago, when various public artworks brought her to wider attention. “I was a woman of mystery – I don’t really move in the art world,” she tells me, brewing loose-leaf lapsang souchong tea in the Camberwell studio where she also lives, set within a Georgian building and furnished with a large, old wooden desk, generous armchairs, lots of books and some of her seminal works on the walls. “But recently I’ve been told about people asking each other at parties, ‘Who is this Joy Gregory? How do you know her?’”
Growing up in Buckinghamshire, a shy girl who loved art class and reading, she discovered the school darkroom in sixth form and went on to study photography and communication at Manchester Polytechnic. The course’s commercial slant – taking pictures to reach a mass audience – solidified her perspective that art ought to speak to everyone. “People mistake it as being something that only happens, or happens best, in galleries,” she says. “It doesn’t.” The drive to connect and share with others – whether strangers, students or TV viewers – led her to do all sorts, including taking several courses in soap-opera scriptwriting, working in clubs, teaching at art colleges and at the women’s prison HMP Holloway, and even achieving an A* in GCSE Spanish ahead of a research trip to Cuba that resulted in her Nineties show “Memory and Skin”. Throughout all these endeavours, her own practice continued to evolve, while remaining consistently characterised by a quality Gregory describes as “seduction”. It is explained and echoed by the Whitechapel show’s title, “Catching Flies with Honey’, which comes from a proverb her mother would use to point out that an idea appears more attractive when presented with an element of sweetness. Her enthusiasm for using visual charm to lure people towards delicate subject matter was met with a certain coolness in the early years. In 1984, during her postgraduate course in photography at the RCA, the college invited her to submit a piece for an exhibition on Black photography but rejected her entry, a botanical image, on the grounds that it wasn’t “Black enough”. “They were looking for things that were more overtly political, which my work wasn’t,” Gregory says now. “It was like coming into battle in your best frock, and everyone else is in fatigues.”
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’Autoportrait’ (1989-1990) by Joy Gregory
She stuck to her guns despite such resistance. “I was in my twenties and everyone else seemed so self-assured. I felt I knew absolutely nothing and wondered if, maybe, I was doing the wrong thing,” she recalls. “But I also believed strongly that you can make whatever work you like – no one can dictate that.” Holding one’s own, and challenging expectations of herself as a Black woman, are recurring themes in Gregory’s oeuvre, and especially evident in her best-known series, Autoportrait, made in the Nineties, which features fragments of her face making various expressions – several quite playful – to the camera. “At that point, women didn’t have much room,” she says. “With those, I wanted to talk about taking up space that wasn’t yet ‘yours’.”
Gender equality has preoccupied Gregory since girlhood, when she went on strike after she and her sister were asked to make up their four brothers’ beds. “I said, ‘Why on Earth? I’m not going to do that!’ And then, of course, the boys had to do their own…” The slow progress of change in the way society defines femininity is probed in the series “Girl Thing” (2002–2004), ghostly cyanotypes of classically “girly” objects including a silk bra, pearl necklace and bathing suit alongside a Barbie doll. “I was curious about Barbie because she’s an icon, created by a woman because she wanted her daughter to play not just at motherhood with a baby doll, but with an adult woman doing things,” she says. “It went a bit pear-shaped with the way Barbie was physically designed, to represent a strange idea of femininity, but it’s an interesting premise.” As such, some of Gregory’s interpretations both critique and enfranchise this famous figure. “I wanted to show Barbie in action and being in her power. I made it into something fun.”
Gregory photographed at Somerset House Studios by Emma Hardy for Harper’s Bazaar, wearing a dress made from offcuts of ’Fierce and Fearless’, a tent she made for William Morris Gallery
In another series featured in the retrospective, Gregory uses women’s quotidian belongings almost ironically – a prosaic, glitzy item carrying the message of a historic wrong. On a research trip exploring the cultural connection between the Caribbean and Europe, she found a pair of golden shoes in a shop in Panama. “Everyone there thought they were the most beautiful things on the planet, but I knew that in Europe they’d be seen as gaudy and unattractive. It wasn’t just about different perceptions, though – it was also about how the ancestors of the Caribbean people had made Europe very rich, yet so many of them and their descendants didn’t have access or means to visit it,” she says. Thus the gold heels became a symbol, and Gregory took them on a Grand Tour, photographing them in front of famous landmarks – an unattainable dream for the formerly colonised and enslaved residents of the Caribbean.
’Bridge of Miracles, Venice’ from the series ’Cinderella Tours Europe’ (1997–2001) by Gregory
Working with and for other communities is central to the artist’s practice and follows her desire to connect with others. Last year, she had many long conversations with asylum-seekers staying in hotels outside Heathrow airport to inform a commission from Art on the Underground for Terminal 4’s station hall. The resulting takeover, titled “A Taste of Home”, saw her adopt the language of botany to represent on billboards people’s resilience and ability to relocate. Her cyanotypes of plants and seeds that have moved and migrated around the world are accompanied by powerful lines of poetry from Warsan Shire’s “Home’ and “Seeds in Flight’ by Khaled Abdallah. (Regular users of the Tube may have picked up her floral tube maps in 2024, too.) For more than two decades, she has been visiting a group living in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert, the last speakers of the dying N|uu language, to make a film that she’s currently trying to finish.
For now, though, Gregory’s priority is to go through all her archives for this month’s exhibition (apart from a brief stint in the Eighties, she has never been represented by a gallery). On a practical level, this has meant taking a separate workspace in Somerset House Studios – the location of Bazaar’s shoot – but more importantly, it has encouraged her to reflect on what and who have shaped her work. Her female heroines include the photojournalist Eve Arnold and the French New Wave director Agnès Varda, who trod their own path, not necessarily intentionally but because “they didn’t realise they were doing anything ‘wrong’”, which Gregory relates to. “I’m incredibly shy. I never thought I was being rebellious – I was always trying to be good and ended up breaking rules without intending to,” she says. “It’s the way my brain works.”
As we head out of the door, I tell her how much I admire her ability to move between different people, different media, different ideas. In typically modest fashion, she replies: “I think everybody’s versatile. If you have to do something, you will just do it. It’s always possible.”
“Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey” is at the Whitechapel Gallery (whitechapelgallery.org) until 1 March 2026.
This story originally appears in the November 2025 issue of Bazaar Art.
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