For Joy Gregory, photography serves as tool for exploring issues of race, class, and gender. Her series Memory and Skin, for example, explores the complex relationship between Europe and the Caribbean. The work questions our notions of identity and representation as Gregory invites the viewer to consider their own position and relationship to the construct that is the Caribbean in the postcolonial world.

In the series Cinderella Tours Europe, we are challenged yet again; the seemingly innocuous tourist snapshots are decidedly less straightforward than they first appear. On the Grand Tour, in this case, are a pair of golden shoes that serve as surrogate for people that may never have the opportunity to visit these familiar places—a part of their cultural heritage—another world away.

Yet it is her latest series, Sri Lanka, which may, at first glance, appear to be a departure from previous work.  Visually arresting, the long-exposure photographs of Sri Lankan interiors are both luminous and atmospheric.  And her scanned flowers, also created during this same period, may also cause some to wonder if her focus has indeed shifted.  But Gregory’s Sri Lankan sojourn allowed her the time and space to “think freely and to try out new things without fear of failure.”  In this case it is the “journey” that takes precedent, as the thread to her previous work may not become apparent to us for years to come.

Gregory was born in Bicester, Oxfordshire, and received her BA (Honours) in Communication Art & Design from Manchester Polytechnic. She went on to do her Masters in Photography at the Royal College of Art.

Gregory has exhibited throughout the UK and in Europe for almost twenty years, as well as in the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, South Africa, and the Netherlands. She was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship for photography in 1996, and received the Individual Artists Award from the London Arts Board in both 1994 and 2002.  She received the prestigious NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) Fellowship in 2002.

Gregory’s work is represented in both public and private collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia, and Yale University. Her work has also been featured in numerous publications, books, and periodicals. A frequent and widely popular speaker, Gregory recently returned to her post as Senior Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication, School of Media.

She has exhibited at Light Work in Syracuse, New York, the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, and has lectured at the California Institute of the Arts.