Born in London to Ghanaian and Dominican parents, Eileen Perrier has built a photographic practice that celebrates Afro-diasporic identity, kinship and resilience. At Autograph, a free retrospective gathers three decades of her portraits, exploring how questions of belonging and visibility are inscribed in the face and body.
Since the 1990s, Eileen Perrier has built a practice rooted in the portrait as a space of connection and recognition. At Autograph, her retrospective A Thousand Small Stories unfolds as both an artistic journey and a social archive, curated by Bindi Vora. The exhibition assembles works that reflect on class, cultural identity and the value of being seen, drawing from her own dual Ghanaian and Dominican heritage as well as her upbringing in London.
Perrier often sets up makeshift studios, inviting people to sit for her in environments shaped by shared experiences of kinship, community or place. This approach, informed by both nineteenth-century European portraiture and contemporary African studio traditions, creates photographs that hold space for individuality while questioning the boundaries of cultural and social divides. “I knew whilst studying documentary photography that I wanted to focus on a subject that was personal and important to me,” she told Aesthetica Magazine, recalling her first trip to Ghana with her mother as a turning point in her career.
The exhibition opens with the series When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years?, in which teenage girls confront the pressures of social media, body image and misogyny. Her early projects, such as Afro Hair and Beauty Show, underscore the politics of beauty by foregrounding hairstyles as acts of cultural pride and resistance. “At the time, I felt like I wasn’t seeing images like that in the mass media… I documented real people who looked good. I wanted to hang these types of images on the walls of galleries,” she explained.
Equally significant is Red, Gold and Green (1997), where Perrier collaborated with three generations of her own British Ghanaian family, transforming London living rooms into improvised studios with vivid fabrics as backdrops. “I couldn’t ask them to come to the university in Farnham to be photographed, so I came up with the concept of taking the studio to them,” she recalled. The colours of the Ghanaian flag became both setting and symbol.
Across three decades, Perrier’s work balances intimacy and collectivity, spanning portraits from Ghana to Brixton beauty salons. As a senior lecturer in photography, she has also shaped future generations of artists. With A Thousand Small Stories -open until 13 September 2025-, Autograph continues its commitment to champion the legacy of Black women photographers, ensuring their contributions to the canon are not only visible but celebrated.
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