PORTRAITS OF BLACK MILLWALL PLAYERS AND FANS

I’m very pleased to announce that I have my first photographic exhibition. It is showing at the Shortwave Café in Bermondsey, London during the month of October.

Black Millwall is a series of portraits of black Millwall players and fans and is a part of a larger project called Millwall’s changing communities: Memories of football and neighbourhood in South London.

The project was originally triggered by media coverage of the death, in 2012, of Tiny, a highly regarded black Millwall supporter. To the outsider, being black and being Millwall would seem a contradiction, certainly strongly at odds with widely held popular images of what Millwall fans are all about. (In)famous for the chant ‘No one likes us, we don’t care’, Millwall Football Club is historically known less for its footballing achievements and more for a fan base with a reputation for intimidation and racial abuse of opponents. But although the wider popular image of Millwall remains clouded by this reputation, it is also a perception that blanks out both the lesser known history of black Millwall fans and decades of Millwall involvement in a local community increasingly dominated by black and minority populations.

Working together with researchers who aimed to collect oral histories of black Millwall fans, my involvement was to make a series of portraits featuring some of the participants who have been interviewed. The resulting portraits are on view together with an accompanying documentary film, Millwall, Black and White: A portrait from the terraces, from the 9th to the 31st of October.

Thank you to Ole Jensen, Chris Haydon and Quince Garcia with whom I worked with on this project.