Vanley Burke has been sitting in his allotment. The 70-year-old photographer’s small plot in his beloved Birmingham is dedicated to root vegetables and fruit, and has been flourishing during lockdown and beyond. This year’s temperamental climate hasn’t hampered things, he says, as he starts taking a mental inventory. “We have had an abundance of callaloo,” says Burke, referring to the vegetable often used in West Indian cooking. “My sweetcorn is coming up quite nicely. I’ve got some chard, redcurrants, gooseberries and wild rhubarb – that works really well.” On Burke’s allotment there’s a shed, which was given to him by the Trinidad-born, Birmingham-based artist Karen McLean. It’s his safe space, he says. A place to think, and to plot – as well as keep an eye on his veg. And if anyone has earned the right to a sit-down, it’s Burke. He has been called the godfather of black British photography and his work takes in five decades of black life in Birmingham – recording protests and community work as well as weddings, funerals and every imaginable aspect of existence from cradle to grave. Mark Sealy, director of Autograph, the photographic arts agency that was founded by black photographers, describes Burke’s photography as “trying to have a bloody long conversation” rather than capture the ephemeral “decisive moment” favoured by Henri Cartier-Bresson. And just as with the produce on his veg plot, Burke has thrived in the West Midlands city where he has lived since arriving as a child from a farm in the foothills of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains in 1965. His mother – who gave him his first camera, a box Brownie, when he was 10 – had moved to the UK to train as a nurse when Burke was four. For the next 10 years he lived with his grandparents, until he rejoined his mother in Handsworth at the age of 14. His mother had remarried and he now had a stepfather, four brothers and a whole new area to photograph one that was a world away from his rural roots. “He’s really, really, really local,” says Sealy, admiringly. “He is not like a black photographer turning up at Notting Hill, saying: ‘I’m photographing my community, I’m representing black life.’ No, he’s well-known in that space.” The Birmingham-based public intellectual Stuart Hall, whom Burke shot, dubbed his pictures not just photographs but “histographs”, which he defined as capturing “the personal, social and economic life of black people as they arrived, settled and became established in British society”. In his book By the Rivers of Birminam, Burke’s philosophy of passing on stories to new generations is discussed by the academic Lynda Morris. Is that how he sees his images, as generation-spanning artefacts? “It’s what people who are members of the community tell me about the work that I do,” he says. “Many of them have said to me, without the images they wouldn’t be able to tell their story to their children.” Burke says there’s even a group of middle-aged black men who meet to talk every month and often pick one of his images to trigger a discussion. “Those are the reasons why I started taking the photographs in the first place,” he says. “It’s about how do we preserve some idea of history within this space to make it clear that we’re not just passing through?” That idea of staying power and securing a footing in Britain runs through Burke’s art. It’s there in his classic 1977 crowd shots of people in Handsworth Park for African Liberation Day (thought to be the largest all-black crowd ever to assemble in Britain), and it reverberates through his images of dancehalls and black politicians, such as James Hunte, who ran for office in 1977. They present a people finding their feet and fighting to keep a hold. Other 1970s images show anti-National Front marches at a time when the far-right group was campaigning for the repatriation of black Britons. Now Burke has a mentoring role in Gloucester, where he has been giving advice to young artists who are investigating black life in the area, with oral histories they collect used as a basis for art works. “They’re very interested in seeing what I’ve done and finding out how I arrived at where I am,” Burke says of the artists he’s working with for the project History, Her Story, Their Story, Our Story. Burke clearly sees his role as being not solely a photographer, but a conduit through which black life in Birmingham can be understood and accessed. His own archive of newspaper clippings, ephemera and images is kept in Birmingham central library. In 2015, he recreated his front room in the city’s Ikon Gallery; the show was described as “a living archive of untold black British history”. Recently, that history has started to be told. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK came the release of Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s five-film anthology series that touched on everything from the Brixton uprising of 1981 to the Mangrove Nine case. Burke was impressed, but he found the Lovers Rock film, an hour-long mood piece set at a “blues” party, hard to watch. While some critics picked it as the stand-out moment from the series, Burke – who has photographed dozens of similar parties in the West Midlands – considered it a missed opportunity. “He had so much really wonderful material at his disposal,” says Burke. “I didn’t think he made good use of it. I didn’t see why we had a rape scene in a garden and then this person just came back into the room and started dancing with everyone else – that’s not my experience.” “The dressing up, the cooking of the food, the buying of the curry goat, the seasoning, the cooking, the setting up of the sound system, all your journeys to this destination is for one thing: it’s when that needle touches the vinyl and I think he missed the point,” says Burke. How about the wider BLM movement – does he think it’s had an impact? He pauses. “We throw stones and then a door opens and a few people are pulled through,” he says. “Then the door is slammed and we throw some more stones and it continues.” The ebb and flow of interest in race issues in the UK doesn’t lead to sustained change, he thinks. “The next thing you know, the people who opened the door say: ‘Look what we’ve done for you.’ While that is happening, we have the Windrush people who have been treated extremely harshly, we have a lot of ongoing issues with the police that haven’t been resolved.” The work goes on. There isn’t a hint that Burke is tired of it, though, and despite the fact that his images are everywhere at the moment, from the stained-glass work installed in the MAC in Birmingham to the War Inna Babylon exhibition at the ICA in London, you won’t catch him taking a victory lap. “I don’t think that we can rest on our laurels and think we’ve done some work and can just sit back and reap the benefit,” he says. “It’s a continuous slog.” Burke will head back to his allotment soon, he says. Back to his callaloo and berries. Then, eventually, he’ll pick up his camera and continue his bloody long conversation.