Pogus Caesar

Pogus Caesar (born 1953, in St. Kitts, West Indies) is a British artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Black British life, migration, protest, social history, and self-representation. Working across photography, conceptual art, film, archiving, curating, and publishing, Caesar examines community, visibility, and historical memory through documentary photographs, portraiture, moving image, and long-term archival work rooted in Birmingham and the wider Black British experience.  Caesar grew up in Birmingham and began as a pointillist painter before turning to photography in the 1980s. His work often engages Black British history, everyday life, musicians, political unrest, and urban communities, using photography and archival practice to consider both the ordinary and the historic. His images of the 1985 Handsworth uprisings are especially well known, and in 2004 he established the OOM Gallery Archive in Birmingham to represent and preserve his photographic archive.  His work has been shown widely, including at the National Portrait Gallery and in major exhibition contexts such as Life Between Islands. His photographs are held by institutions including the National Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. In 2018, Birmingham City University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate, and he is also listed as a Visiting Professor there.