ABSTRACT
Birmingham Central Library's photographic collections are of national significance, with an archive of over two million images dating from 1842 to the present day. This chapter traces how Birmingham's holdings reveal a specific set of problems and situations in their representation of people from British colonies in the Caribbean. It examines the importance of context and agency in an attempt to understand the extent to which studio portraits and photo-documentary from the 1950s and 1970s reconfigure the imperial gaze. In the 'journey through the imperial gaze' that is enabled through Birmingham's photographic collections and archives, the Dyche pictures are at a major crossroads in the diasporic experience. Changes in representation evidenced by the Dyche studio portraits are available to be read in the wider context of ethnographic studio photographs taken in the Caribbean in the 1870s and collected by Sir Benjamin Stone.
