The British National Party caused outrage earlier this year when it used images of Winston Churchill and spitfires in its so-called 'Battle for Britain' European election campaign. Four retired generals, including General Sir Mike Jackson, immediately published an open letter protesting at what they described as the hijacking of 'the good name of Britain's military', adding: 'The values of these extremists - many of whom are essentially racist - are fundamentally at odds with the values of the modern British military, such as tolerance and fairness'.

The debate and subsequent furore opened up a fascinating subject - the photographic depiction of Britain. It's a question that's been exercising Autograph ABP too, but for very different reasons. It won a £660,500 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund last May to build an Archive and Research Centre for Culturally Diverse Photography, which Professor Stuart Hall, emeritus professor of sociology at the Open University and chair of Autograph, said would help recover a 'missing chapter' of British history. 'This archive of a very difficult time will try to preserve traces of what's been an invisible and marginalised history,' he added. 'It's an effort to re-remember who we are, because without that history we forget the histories that have made us. In the end, cultures and identities do not exist outside of how they're represented.'

The archive and research centre will open to the public in 2011, and feature a diverse mix of images centring on the post-war black British experience. The term 'black' is being used in a wide sense, says archive project manager Renee Mussai, to refer to culturally diverse communities and engage with four key themes: the growing post-war diaspora in Britain; key events in the history of British multiculturalism; portraiture, of both influential figures and unknown people; and fine art photography exploring cultural identity. The photographers involved don't necessarily come from ethnic minorities, but they must explore these issues - Anna Fox's Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) project on the ambiguous blacked-up figure in Dutch Christmas celebrations, for example, will sit alongside work by long-term Autograph collaborators such as Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta and Eileen Perrier.

Autograph currently holds around 1500 prints, 1500 slides and 2000 digital files, acquired over the last 20 years from key, often fine art photographers through donations, acquisitions and commissions. Making some of this collection available to the public is the first step - and Autograph has digitised 400 prints in the last three months alone - but Mussai is also keen to expand. She was recently introduced to 80-year old photo- grapher James Barnor, for example, whose life-long career includes shots from both the Swinging Sixties in London and his Ghanian homeland. Spanning everything from 1940s portrait studio photography to social documentary and fashion spreads for Drum magazine, it's a fascinating addition to the archive, and Mussai is also currently curating an exhibition his work for the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Mussai is also planning a series of roadshows across the UK next year to find new artists and tap into thousands of previously unseen family snaps. 'Looking at, and actively engaging with, Britain's multicultural communities will form a major part of the archive's programme,' she says. 'Starting with a pilot in London, we will take the roadshow to major English cities where members of the public will have the chance to make their own contribution to this historic resource.

From the back of a van, images will be digitised and catalogued to turn the collection into a continuously growing, living archive. Images by amateur photographers whose family pictures reveal another story of a complex and diverse Britain will be represented alongside images by established artists - the 'domestic' photographs in Autograph's collection bear witness to the potential transformation of the family album and vernacular photographs into powerful narratives of community, memory, history and identity.'

The archive will be made freely available to members of the public, schools and universities, both online and in reading and study rooms in Autograph's Rivington Place HQ. Schools are an important facet, and Autograph has already started a pilot education project with Hackney Community College, but it also has a commercial imperative, and will make most of the images available for licensing. As Mussai puts it: 'We aim to make these historically absent images publicly available, place them in a critical socio-political context and disseminate.'

Missing chapter

She wants to ensure that Britain's diverse cultural history is evident all the time, and not just in Black History Month, she adds, and for photographer Eileen Perrier that can't come soon enough. 'It's really important there's an archive people can research and at present there's nothing,' she says. 'We need to create a history of identity in Britain, and hopefully that will encourage other institutions to go through their archives and consider them in a different way.'

Perrier has been involved with Autograph since 1995, working at the organisation for a while assisting director Mark Sealy. The archive includes some of her images of the Afro Hair and Beauty show and shots from Red, Gold and Green, in which she photographed members of her Ghanaian extended family. Some of her projects, especially her early work, have consciously explored issues of black cultural identity but others, she says, were simply inspired by her experiences. 'I was born in London, so when I went back to Ghana with my mother it was a chance to see the place she'd talked about over the years,' she says.

'I come from a mixed cultural background of Ghanaian and Dominican descent and this has presented me with questions about placement, cultural identity and diversity,' she adds on her website. 'My work has drawn upon the long tradition of African portraiture since my first visit to Ghana in 1996. My objective was to communicate a less preconceived impression of what it is to be a person of African descent.'

Franklyn Rodgers works on similar questions. His most recent project, Underexposed, responded to the lack of positive black role models, gathering together portraits of 30 successful black actors. Initially exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, it's now on show on the streets in Peckham where, he proudly tells me, it's stayed graffiti-free. These images will soon be added to the Autograph archive, joining Rodgers' projects on first-generation immigrants, Elders, and his large collection of portraits. 'It's not just a question of black identity but how people choose to identify,' he says. 'How we are represented reflects our society, because everything else is filtered down through that.'

A second-generation black Briton, he's interested in the notion of presentation itself, and in traditions of portraiture from both Europe and Africa. He became interested in African masks and their role as portraits in African society and facial scarification, for example, and used these aesthetics to build a new, hybrid photography. Using lights and shadow, he created new patterns on his sitters' face, emulating the marks of tribal scars without actually breaking the surface of the skin. 'It's a rite of passage for the person I photograph,' he says. 'The photo-graph is just testimony for others to see.'

His work has been 'an amazing journey of self discovery', he says, vital to understanding his past and therefore being able to understand himself and map out his future. He hopes that by filling in a 'missing chapter' of British history, the archive will help others do the same. 'It's such an important body of work because it's history,' he says. 'It reiterates and reclaims the last 30 years for reference. If you were an alien and came down to Britain and only had access to archives and books, you wouldn't know there were so many minorities in this country. But we have contributed to a landscape that makes Britain unique - because what makes Britain so unique is its diversity.'

Online

Autograph ABP

autograph-abp.co.uk

Eileen Perrier

eileenperrier.com

Franklyn Rodgers

franklynrodgers.com.