Eileen Perrier is a portrait photographer of Ghanaian and Dominican descent who uses her practice to explore cultural identity, diversity and placement.
Perrier lives and works in London and is a graduate of The Royal College of Art. Her work is influenced by a diverse range of portraiture histories, with her earlier work drawing on traditional African portraiture. In these works, Eileen focuses on creating colourful images that directly contrast the black and white images of poverty that frequently portray Africa in mainstream media.
Perrier pushes the boundaries of traditional portrait photography, from using Victorian portrait techniques to taking photos on her phone of sitters she encounters in her day to day life for her Mobile Portraits series.
In summer 2014 Peckham Platform commissioned Perrier to make a new body of work from a mobile studio on Peckham Square. The Peckham Square Studios exhibition showed black and white portraits of local people. She was also included in Peckham Platform’s 2016 Retrospective exhibition, a celebration of the 20 artists commissioned by Peckham Platform between 2010 – 2016.
Perrier is widely exhibited, including The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Tate Britain, London and The Whitechapel Gallery, London. Perrier has also been artist in residence at Light Work (in partnership with Autograph ABP) in New York, USA and Senior Lecturer in Photography at The University of Westminster, London.
