Vanley Burke has photographed the Jamaican Community in Handsworth since the mid 1960s. His images reveal a great compassion for his own people, expressed in his image of the Africa Liberation Day crowds gathered in Handsworth Park.

This book is published alongside the exhibition of the same name at MAC Birmingham (22 September – 18 November 2012). It  contextualizes his images through a collage of quotes from the press on the history of immigration to Birmingham.

His interest in photography began when he was gifted a camera by his mother at the age of 10, and in 1967 he embarked on a career documenting the lives and experience of people from the African Caribbean community in Birmingham.

In 2007, his work was featured in the Tate Britain exhibition How We Are: Photographing Britain. Internationally he has exhibited at Museum Africa in Johannesburg, the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York, and Bamako Photography Festival in Mali. His archive is held in Birmingham Central Library and forms one of the cornerstones of their contemporary photography collection.