Val Wilmer photographs published in new book and shown at solo, Barbican and Tate exhibitions
Mike Flynn
Monday, October 30, 2023
The renowned jazz photographer and Jazzwise contributor’s photos will be shown at three exhibitions and in a new book published this autumn
At the end of a busy year, Jazzwise contributor Val Wilmer is having a one-woman exhibition of her photographs in North London in November. ‘Blue Moments, Black Sounds – A Retrospective’ runs at Worldly, Wicked and Wise Gallery, from 1 to 30 November.
It includes early portraits of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters and Aretha Franklin, photographs of New York’s free music scene, and of blues artists and church congregations in America’s deep south. Other rarely-seen images celebrate aspects of the African diaspora; Nigerian weddings and dances in London, the Notting Hill Carnival, and music in the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Wilmer’s Deep Blues 1960-1988 is being published by the prestigious photography imprint, Café Royal Books, around the same time. All this in a year in which the work of Format Photographers, the all-woman agency co-founded in 1983 by Wilmer and Maggie Murray, is part of a major exhibitions at the Barbican in October and Tate Britain (‘Women in Revolt’) in November.
The Worldly, Wicked and Wise Gallery is at 81 Salusbury Road, London NW6 6NH – for more info visit www.wwwgallery.co.uk