Amber Pinkerton was born in Jamaica in 1997 and lives and works in London, UK. Pinkerton holds a BA in Photography from the University of Westminster (2019-2023). Pinkerton has exhibited internationally throughout the UK, France, Sweden, Germany, and the United States. Recent institutional exhibitions include 'Female View: Female Fashion Photographers from Modernity to the Digital Age' at Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck & Museum Schloss Moyland, Germany and 'Black Venus' which toured Fotografiska, New York, The Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, USA and Somerset House, London, UK. Pinkerton has exhibited in shows amongst pioneering artists such as James Barnor, Carrie Mae Weems, Deana Lawson and Sarah Moon. Pinkerton has previously been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 (2022), The New York Times Style Magazine's list of '15 Creative Women for Our Time' (2020) and in the 2020 British Fashion Council's New Wave: Creatives List. She was listed in the Dazed 100 rankings (2020) as well as i-D's ‘Photographers to follow in 2020’. Pinkerton is also the founder of the online library ‘JA Editorial Archive (2023) which aims for wider circulation of fashion print material shot in Jamaica as a contribution to Jamaica's photographic development. Pinkerton is represented worldwide by Lalaland Artists for her commercial & editorial photographic and film projects.

Pinkerton’s practice is rooted in identity politics, with a focus on Jamaica and its diaspora. Exploring the nature of personhood and individual and collective cultural agency, Pinkerton’s work is an ongoing form of active socio-political critique. In her recent works, Pinkerton begins to explore the 'photograph as object' in its physical realm, with focus on its tactility and materiality, as well as autobiographical self-portraiture, virtual reality, sound and the written word. In her acclaimed debut solo show ‘Self-Dialogues: Hard Food’, Alice Black Gallery, London UK (2023), the first chapter of an ongoing multi-part, immersive photographic and moving image series, Pinkerton reveals personal meditations on themes traversing migrational loneliness, love and desire, family/household tension, coloniality and cultural memory. Comprised of a 6-channel film shot on 16mm and Super 8 film, Mahogany held digital prints, duo tone silk screens, tea toned cyanotypes, an immersive soundscape of her poetry and a film object made from digital screen capture; Pinkerton expertly juxtaposes and distils the analogue and digital image through intuition and primary instinct, traversing spiritual and conceptual dichotomies in tandem. Pinkerton’s self-confessional and diaristic works harness the expertise of her prolific commercial background alongside her conceptual training. The resulting evolving body of work holds urgent relevance to prescient explorations of feminist autotheory and post coloniality, whilst first and foremost experienced as a visceral and vulnerable stirring directly from the body-mind of Pinkerton to the body-mind of the viewer.

 

selected works