The Exchange Project

Vanley Burke
Vanley Burke has been living and working in Birmingham since 1965. He started photographing the community around him in 1967 and has continued to the present day. He has also undertaken two self-financed visits to record people and events in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Vanley has exhibited his work extensively, with individual exhibitions at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, Cornerhouse in Manchester, The Black Arts Gallery in London, The Birmingham Museum and Arts Gallery and the Walsall Museum and Arts Gallery, amongst others. His work has also been exhibited in individual exhibitions in New York and Mali.

George Hallett
George Hallett was born in Cape Town. He left aparthied South Africa in 1970 and worked in London as a free-lance photographer for The Times Educational Supplement, BBC TV, Heinemann Educational Books (as a cover designer) and a host of other publications.

He has exhibited and taught extensively in Europe, Africa and North America. During his years of self-imposed exile, Hallett also lived in France, The Netherlands, USA and Zimbabwe.

He is currently based in Cape Town, where he takes an active role in local as well as international cultural activities.

Biographical Sketch by Pete James

Born in Jamaica in 1951, Vanley Burke's interest in photography began when his mother sent him a camera from England for his 10th birthday. When he left Jamaica to come to England in 1965 his aunt asked if he was going to leave her something. At the time he had a portable radio and the camera. He left the radio.

In England Burke began taking photographs of his friends and family but his photography soon began to develop as a means of looking at people and how they lived. He has often said that his goal has been to 'show his people to themselves'.

Vanley worked as a technician in the Photography Department at Birmingham Polytechnic and used the opportunities this presented to develop his photographic skills. However, it was not until he was awarded a Kodak Bursary in 1979 that he convinced himself that photography was something worth pursuing. And from that time to this, he has single-mindedly followed his self appointed task to document the life of the black community in Britain.

Burke's first major exhibition Handsworth from the Inside was shown at the Ikon Gallery Birmingham, and the Commonwealth Institute, London in 1983. Although much of his work has been shown in traditional gallery settings in venues from New York to Mali, Vanley has also displayed work in locations more easily accessed by black audiences including pubs, clubs, community centres, churches schools and pool halls.

In 1990 Burke received a call from a friend in South Africa saying 'South Africa is going to be free and we need you here'. The self-funded visit that followed resulted in the exhibition No Time For Flowers, first shown at Walsall Museum and Art Gallery in 1991. Two years later in 1993 Autograph published a retrospective to accompany his exhibition The Journey, also shown at Walsall. Burke returned to South Africa in 1996 and was commissioned to photograph the veterans of the anti-Apartheid struggle.

Over thirty years after first having picked up his camera, Vanley Burke is still documenting the black community in the UK. He is currently working on a number of projects including an exhibition/publication project documenting the Asian community in Birmingham.

Biographical Sketch by M S Abba-Omar

It is only fitting that his credits should read as long as those of a movie because, in a manner of speaking, it is movies that have been an inspiration for South African photographer George Hallett, whose favourite pastime was the regular Friday night film show at tthe primary school in the fishing village of Hout Bay.

On the way home, as his friends enacted scenes from the movie, Hallett would be thinking about the camera angles, composition and dramatic lighting that impressed him in the film. The seeds were sown for a career in photography, but his calling would come years later, after high school and various jobs.

At the age of 20 he began a correspondence course in photography with the UK City and Guilds. Having no success at finding work as a photographer, Hallett left for Europe in 1970.

But before his departure, author James Matthews persuded him to photograph District Six which the Apartheid regime was preparing to raze to the ground. This work he donated to the District Six Museum. Matthew and Hallett's English teacher, the author Richard Rive, were some of the notable figures who were influencial in his development – intellectual, political and cultural.

Hallett moved to London where he made contact with South African exiles such as Alex La Guma, Pallo Jordan, Dudu Pukwana and Dumile. He freelanced for The Times newspapers for many years and designed book covers for Heinemann Educational Books for over 12 years. During this period he had his first exhibition in Amsterdam under the auspices of the World Council of Churches.

In 1974 he moved to France, near Perpignan, where he practiced small-scale farming. The local people became the subjects of his photographic work. But he regularly went abroad to teach and exhibit, as well as maintaining contact with fellow exiles. He subsequently lived in Paris and Amsterdam.

Hallett's work has been exhibited at the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, New York, Sonja-Henie-Nils Onstad Museum, Norway, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Wetekerk, Amsterdam, Presence Africaine, Paris, University of Lund, Sweden, Atelier Six in Ceret, France, Frankfurter Buchmesse, Germany, Howard University Gallery of Modern Art, Washington D.C., The Jrma Stern Museum in Cape Town and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.

It was back to France in 1985 for Hallett, but this time it has Paris – the city of light – where he lived and worked until 1992. In 1994 the African National Congress commissioned him to photograph the movement's coming to power. A series of photographs of Mandela during the elections of that year won him a Golden Eye Award from the World Press Photo in Amsterdam.

Hallett is now back in Cape Town and thoroughly enjoying recording the transformation of his country. He has maintained his international network of friends and colleagues, continuing cultural activities in many countries.