Val Wilmer

As a writer and photographer, Val Wilmer has been documenting black music and the lives of the musicians who make it in the US and the UK since the early 1960s. In that time she has interviewed and photographed almost every significant figure in post-war jazz, blues and R&B, from Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler via Muddy Waters and Aretha Franklin.

Val's journalism, which has appeared in multiple publications from The Guardian to The Wire, is distinctive for the way it combines reportage and musicology with a historian's concern for the facts and a radical political agenda informed by her contacts with black musicians and the burgeoning black liberation movement. Likewise, her portrait photography captures musicians in informal, domestic or communal settings, emphasising the social dynamics that underpin their lives and music.

In the 1970s and '80s Val became active in the women's movement, writing about the experiences of women in music, and co-founding Format, the UK's first all-women photographers' agency. In the UK her work is included in the archives of the British Library, the V&A Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, and she is a contributor to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Her books include Jazz People (1970), The Face of Black Music (1976), As Serious As Your Life: The Story of The New Jazz (1977), and the autobiography Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This: My Life In The Jazz World (1989).