A lot of history never makes it into an archive.
It lives in somebody remembering which club everyone went to in the 1980s. A photograph kept in a drawer. The way a family name is said. The woman who remembers where Black women travelled to get their hair done before there was a Black salon in town.
It lives in churches and mosques, kitchens and barbershops, parties, recipes, music and clothes, and in the organisations people built when nothing else met their needs.
When I made HAIR, one of the sitters told me that at thirteen she travelled from Hull to Leeds for her first salon appointment, because there was no Black hairdresser at home. Stories like that are rarely written down anywhere.
And they are easy to lose. Photographs get thrown away when a house is cleared. Businesses close. Venues disappear. Sometimes the only person who can say what a photograph shows is the person who was there.
The Black North is a heritage project to record some of that while the people who carry it can still tell it themselves. It starts in Hull and will reach other towns and cities across the North, chosen with the people and partners I meet along the way.
I’ll be recording conversations, photographing people and places as they are now, and, where people want it, scanning family photographs, letters, flyers and objects. Nobody has to hand anything over. Your photograph can stay in your drawer. You decide what is shared, what stays in the family, and what isn’t kept at all.
Nobody could tell the whole story of Black life in the North, and this won’t try. It will hold some of the stories, told by the people who lived them.