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This weekend, the streets of West London will once again fill with music, dancing, costumes and millions of people as Notting Hill Carnival celebrates its 60th anniversary. So, the timing couldn’t be better for our conversation with London photographers and visual activists Wayne Campbell and Wayne Crichlow, whose new collaborative photo book, Carnival of Resistance, looks beyond the spectacle to the history, culture and resistance at the heart of Carnival.
The two Wayne Cs, as we quickly discovered during our conversation, share more than a name. They are both visual activists, sharing a belief in photography as a way of preserving stories, documenting communities and saying something about the world around them.
For Campbell, that became especially clear in 2020. After witnessing the murder of George Floyd on TV, he began thinking differently about what he wanted his photography to accomplish. “I realized that I wanted my work to say more than ‘I’m pretty,’” he told us. “It needed to be a reflection of what my values were.” That was when he began calling himself a visual activist. He said, “My passion, photography, met my focus. And the two together gave me direction.”
For Crichlow, street photography provided many of the tools he now brings to documenting protests and other social movements: observing rather than interfering, anticipating moments and looking beyond the obvious scene for emotion.
“The only tool that I have is my camera,” he says. “Everybody is a storyteller. What you use to tell that story is not really that important [compared with] telling the story itself.”
More than a Party
What Crichlow and Campbell have achieved with Carnival of Resistance is much more than a collection of photographs from one of the world’s biggest street celebrations. The book looks at the history underneath it: migration, racism, resistance and the Caribbean community’s determination to celebrate and preserve its culture in Britain. “There is a reason why the book’s called Carnival of Resistance,” Crichlow told us. “The origins [are] all about defiance. It’s all about resistance.”
When I first saw their photographs, I could feel that resistance before I knew much about the project. These weren’t simply bright, celebratory Carnival images. There was a fierceness to them. And interestingly, that comes through despite, or maybe partly because of, the photographers’ very different visual languages. Campbell works in black and white while Crichlow brings color, often desaturated, to the project. Rather than forcing the two approaches to match, they allowed them to play off one another.
The collaboration also pushed them to look harder at their own work. Campbell remembers placing one of Crichlow’s photographs into a spread and realizing he needed to go back through his own archive to find something strong enough to sit beside it. In the process, both photographers rediscovered images they’d previously overlooked. It’s a problem most photographers know well: sometimes we’re simply too close to our own work to see it clearly.
The finished book brings together years of photography alongside contributions from writers and poets exploring different aspects of Carnival culture and history. The book is beautifully made, and at a time when so much of photography and culture is experienced fleetingly online, Carnival of Resistance becomes something more permanent. It preserves not only what Carnival looks like, but something of what it means.
As Campbell says near the end of our conversation, resistance doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Carnival lets us see “the joy, the colour, the beauty, the sound, the smells” within it.
Listen to our full conversation with Wayne Campbell and Wayne Crichlow to hear more about Carnival of Resistance, visual activism, collaborating on a photobook, editing years of photographs and why another photographer might be exactly what you need to help you see your own work differently.
Read the SPM Feature Article:
Wayne Crichlow & Wayne Campbell document the culture, traditions, and communities behind the Notting Hill Carnival.
A Selection of Photos from Carnival of Resistance
Your Work Can Become a Book, Too
One of the things we love about Carnival of Resistance is that Wayne and Wayne didn’t wait for someone else to decide their work belonged in a book. They took years of photographs, shaped them into a story and made the book themselves. You can do that, too.
Our self-paced course, How to Self-Publish a Photo Book, walks you through the process of turning a body of photographic work into a physical book, from selecting and sequencing your images to design, printing, marketing and distribution. You don’t need a publisher, a competition win or permission. You just need a place to start.
Learn more and start creating your own photo book.
