Val Wilmer: ‘Blue Moments, Black Sounds’

Val Wilmer is one of the most remarkable people I know, and you’ll know that too if you’ve seen her photographs. Whether it’s Muddy Waters playing cards with Brownie McGhee backstage at the Fairfield Halls in 1964, Archie Shepp sitting beneath a Jimi Hendrix poster in his New York apartment, or a joyful couple whose names we’ll never know at a blues dance in Bentonia, Mississippi half a century ago, she finds the essence of the human spirit.

Those three images are among the several dozen included in Blue Moments, Black Sounds, an exhibition of her photographs which opened this week. It’s on until the end of November at a very nice little gallery in Queen’s Park, North London, which specialises in music photography and where you can also go to get your own pictures framed.

I was particularly moved by the only photograph in the show that has an extended caption, written by Wilmer, in which she tells of going to see Louis Armstrong at Earl’s Court in 1956, when she was a 14-year-old schoolgirl. When Armstrong and the All Stars left the country, catching a plane to Ghana, she and her brother went to see them off at the airport. She took her mother’s Box Brownie camera, asked Louis if she could take his photograph, and got a lovely shot that put her, as she says, “on my way to a lifetime of learning.”

Then she adds something interesting and important: “Through getting to know the musicians, I learnt the importance of positive representation.” That doesn’t mean she learnt how to take PR photographs. It means she learnt to appreciate the importance of immersing herself in the world of her subjects, in order to portray them with greater sensitivity to their lives and to the art that came from it, and to realise that pictures of Ornette Coleman playing pool with Anthony Braxton or members of the Count Basie orchestra snoozing on the band bus can actually tell us more than photos of them on stage.

Those photographs, like most of the ones in the new show, could only have been taken by someone possessing not just painstakingly acquired technical skills but a deep sympathy with the music and the lives of those who make it, and with the courage and humility to take her own place in their world, and to find her unique vantage point.

* Val Wilmer’s Blue Moments, Black Sounds is at the WWW (Worldly, Wicked & Wise) Gallery, 81 Salusbury Road, London NW6 6NH until 30 November: wwwgallery@yahoo.com. Deep Blues 1960-1988, a pamphlet of Wilmer’s photographs from the world of the blues, edited by Craig Atkinson, has just been published by Café Royal Books: caferoyalbooks.com. Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution 1957-1977 is published by Serpent’s Tail.