Muzik Kinda Sweet - Photographs 1985 - 2009
Fazeley Studios, 191 Fazeley St, Birmingham, UK

MUZIK KINDA SWEET celebrates in its 37photographs a quarter of a century of image making about the music industries by Birmingham based visual artist, Pogus Caesar, whose career spans film making, photography and television production.

In a 30 year career of taking pictures, Pogus Caesar has captured moments of everyday life with a simple Auto Focus camera, spontaneously recording the unfamiliar, and the celebrated; the laconic, and the iconic. And never more so, than with music.

Pogus Caesar's distinct visual style emerged in the late 1970's when much of the country's popular life was consumed by the DIY ethos of the punk era. Bloated professionalism and pompous excesses were binned in favour of attitude, spirit and street savvy. An inter cultural creativity came to the fore in the city in music, film, writing and photography, responding to the economic and political climate of the late 1970's and early 1980's. In this context, it is revealing to identify some of the influences on Caesar's work.

There are the black and white street images of Diane Arbus; Leonard Freed's use of light and shadow; Gordon Parkes, the African American photographer, and film director of SHAFT; Henri Cartier Bresson, the French photographer, who knew how to just do it; and Caribbean influences include Edward Kamau Braithwaite, the Barbadian writer, and reggae based movies such as THE HARDER THEY COME, with Jimmy Cliff.


From Burning Spear in 1985 to Grace Jones in 2009, this unique exhibition documents how black music, in its reggae and soul tributaries of sound, has changed and renewed itself over the decades. From Augustus Pablo to Jay-Z via Mica Paris, these images conjure up an alphabet of the music of the Black Atlantic, connecting the UK to the Caribbean to the USA, and back again, as influences take indigenous root and blossom.


MUZIK KINDA SWEET also documents how the city of Birmingham, the UK's Motor City of Music, has embraced wave after wave of new musical iconography, whether emerging from that other Motor City Tamla Motown's Detroit in the USA - or from that capital of both reggae and Jamaica, the city of Kingston. And, in the inclusion of Steel Pulse, Roland Gift of the Fine Young Cannibals and Benjamin Zephaniah, Birmingham has its own icons to celebrate.




The show is also as much about the clubs and venues, as it is about the singers and musicians. The Wailers at The Tower Ballroom, Sly Dunbar at The Hummingbird Club , Junior Reid at the International Hotel, Stevie Wonder at Central Music Studios ,Cameo at the Odeon, Ben E King at the Hippodrome, Jazzie B at BBC Pebble Mill, many venues now lost to regeneration or renewal, and only recalled through memory and imagery . In their day such venues welcomed black music with open charms, giving safe havens to their audiences, and helping to shape the city's own distinctive underground and mainstream sound.

Legendary reggae artists figures prominently, and appropriately, in the Caesar image canon - Burning Spear, The Wailers, Augustus Pablo, Rita Marley, Mighty Diamonds, Black Uhuru, Sly Dunbar, Steel Pulse, Lee ‘Scratch' Perry etc. For his creative approach, reggae itself is a significant influence, reflecting perhaps his own St Kitts background in the Eastern Caribbean.

‘"Reggae is a major motivation, especially its spiritual aspects. It's mainly the early music of Augustus Pablo and Lee ‘Scratch' Perry the reggae Phil Spector that I listen to"


MUZIK KINDA SWEET - Snapshots of music, clubs and life from the lens of Pogus Caesar and the OOM Gallery Archive.

WORDZ KINDA NEAT by Professor Roger Shannon
Producer, swish Films; Professor, Film and Television, Edge Hill University, Liverpool

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