Rhonda Wilson MBE (17 August 1953 – 6 November 2014) was a women's activist, photographer, writer, editor, and educator in British contemporary photography, best known for her initiation of the Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival of the Image.
Biography
Wilson was born in Birmingham on 17 August 1953 to parents Len and Daisy Wilson, and was the sole sibling of a brother, Clive. In the 1970s she was a trainee journalist with D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd. in Dundee, on Jackie magazine as a music editor, stylist, photographer and agony aunt.
Photographer, activist
From 1980 in Birmingham Wilson was a freelance graphic designer and editor contributing to such publications as Insist: Birmingham Women Paper, and increasingly worked in photography. With Sue Green she conducted a series of women's photography workshops held in the Arts Lab at The Triangle, Gosta Green in the early eighties. She co-founded the women artists' group Feminsto in 1981, and campaigned against women's low pay and homelessness, exhibiting photo series including Worth Paying For commissioned by the West Midlands Low Pay Unit, The Age of the Elders on people from different cultures of the city ageing together, and From The Heart of the City, a group of 80 portraits of women.
As it did for Peter Kennard, the format of the poster combined Wilson's skills for political purpose; she was the author of a poster illustrated with a photograph by Richard Cross, for two photographic exhibitions Two Faces of War, of Central America by John Hoadland and Richard Cross, and Nicaragua by Susan Meiselas shown at the Triangle Photography Gallery 4 February-1 March 1986. Rough Justice was a set of six posters by Wilson published in 1987 by Birmingham City Council Womens Committee. Martha Rosler remarked of her work that; Some photographers reject "humanist" documentary, with its multiplicity of buried texts about powerlessness. Rhonda Wilson, of Birmingham, England, wittily staged images for her poster series on women and homelessness in England.
Wilson's career included involvement in Ten.8 magazine where, by 1984, she had joined the editorial board and was responsible for the Ten.8 Touring program of travelling exhibitions supported by West Midland Arts from 1986. She designed two of its issues; "Another Coal Face" (1984) and "Evidence" (1987). She and Roshini Kempadoo co-edited the Spectrum Women's Photography Festival exhibition catalogue, published as a special supplement to issue 30 of 1988.
Also in that year she had a retrospective at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, visited the Houston FotoFest portfolio reviews in the US that inspired her to set them up later in Britain, and was a presenter discussing "Enterprise/Photography/Culture: Is this the New Reality for Photography?", alongside Graham Budgett, Willie Doherty, Joy Gregory, Susan Hardy, Sylvia Harvey, David Hevey, Pervaise Khan, Eamonn McCabe, Gaby Porter, Juanito Waswhadi, Alan Sekula, and Deborah Willis at the National Photography Conference 21 to 23 July 1989 in Newcastle, a biennial event supported by the Arts Council.
She undertook a Master of Arts in Photographic Theory at the University of Derby 1988 – 1990 and, in partnership with Ming de Nasty, in 1989 established the Poseurs Studio and Gallery in Birmingham's Balsall Heath area, hosting and assembling photographic exhibitions into the early 1990s. She and Ming de Nasty designed half-tone lineblock, black and purple posters in series A Sense of Place, addressing the subject of homeless women in Britain, based on an exhibition of photographs also entitled 'A Sense of Place', held at the National Museum of Film and Photography, Bradford, as part of the Spectrum Women's Photography Festival, 1989.
Wilson left Ten.8 in 1991, but was still listed as 'Editorial Advisor in 1992. The magazine folded in 1993 due to the early 1990s recession.
Working internationally became integral to her photographic projects, developed as campaigns on social issues such as homeless women and unemployment which in the 1990s attracted the attention of overseas gallery curators, resulting in exhibitions in Europe, Australia and the USA. A Sense of Place, her series on women and homelessness, was seen in Bradford, London, Rotterdam, New York and Chicago. Invitations to speak at international photography conferences in Spain and Portugal and at an exhibition of her work in Finland resulted from interest in her working methods of this period in digitised images on CD-ROM and uploaded to overseas via the limited internet bandwidth then available.