Picturing Black Women: A documentary photo project

Abdi Osman Aurelia, Picturing Black Women series, 2014.

This project seeks to document black women from the Caribbean and Africa who arrived in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. It derives from a desire to document and archive their arrival and their ensuing challenges, to include both their successes and failures. At the same time, their capture entails careful thought towards their aesthetic framing pertaining to issues of labour and aging.

Abdi Osman, Beverley, Picturing Black Women series, 2014.

There is now more information and scholarship to help contextualize their experiences, ranging from Makeda Silvera's relatively early Silenced (1989), an insightful compilation of interviews with Caribbean domestics, to Karen Flynn's scholarly Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora (2011), a focused study of nurse emigrees. Both works provide considerable insight into how to situate these women, and offer helpful tools to track them and their cohort.

Abdi Osman, Camille, Picturing Black Women series, 2015.

The idea for the Picturing Black Women project emerged from a conversation with a woman who lamented that their trajectory is often left out of mainstream discourses of migration, as well as how this particular mobility is imagined. These photographs not only work to provide a corrective to this oversight, but to also illuminate how women who migrated during this era eventually sought employment in a range of professions.

The 1960s and 1970s are key to thinking about black migration to Canada. It was during this period that immigration laws changed, leading to the Immigration Act of 1976. This allowed for more black migrants to enter Canada and included allowances for the reunification of families. Since the 1980s black immigration has shifted predominantly from Caribbean to African populations. While the project initially documented Caribbean women, recent work has turned toward women of African heritage, especially West African women. One factor that has emerged is that a high percentage of African women who arrived in Canada to study have chosen to remain in Canada, enjoying successful careers in a range of professions.

Abdi Osman, Paulette, Picturing Black Women series, 2015.

Most of the subjects featured in this project are in the early stages of retirement, and thus I am not only documenting black women migrants, but I am photographing them as they transition into a new phase of life in Canada. My camera is witness to their becoming, if you will. Taking my cues from my subjects, I will photograph the women wherever they choose, in a range of backdrops and environments. Short captions taken from interviews with my subjects on their unique work and migration narratives supplement the overarching theme of the photographs: labour and aging in the specific context of gendered black migration.