Autograph in Hackney is given Armet Francis’s archive of more than 70,000 photos

Autograph, the Hackney-based arts charity, has been given the archive of Jamaican-British photographer Armet Francis, a collection of more than 70,000 images.

For over 40 years Francis has recorded the lives of African diasporic communities in Britain and elsewhere. When Autograph was set up in 1988, under its original name of the Association of Black Photographers, he was among those who signed its founding papers. The archive is therefore going to an organisation he helped create.

Professor Mark Sealy OBE, the charity’s director, said the photographer and Autograph had worked alongside each other for almost four decades. He said the gift in many ways explains why the charity exists: “it’s for moments like this.”

Armet Francis photographs in an online gallery

To mark the gift, Autograph has put a selection of rarely seen pictures from the archive into an online gallery. It includes a commemorative Windrush portrait series from 2008 and his 1994 pictures of Lambeth and Brixton Tube, which record the mixed community around the borough of Lambeth.

Other images show Angela Davis speaking to a packed room at the Keskidee Centre in 1975, and young Black Londoners protesting in 1981 over the lack of justice after the New Cross Fire.

Notting Hill Carnival in 1968

One picture Sealy singles out is a monochrome shot of Notting Hill Carnival taken in 1968, titled Carnival Sound System 1968. He called it “a radically important image because it appears to signpost a future Britain.” In his view it shows people using music and culture to build a place where they belong, at a time when newspapers and television usually presented Black communities in terms of immigration, crisis or social anxiety.

Sealy pointed out that the photograph dates from a year when the future of multicultural Britain was still being fiercely fought over. Both the Race Relations Act and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act reached the statute book in 1968.