Award for the acclaimed images that capture the history of black

When Horace Ove emigrated to London from Trinidad in the 1960s, he was dismayed by the racism he encountered. He was abused on the street, refused service in pubs and restaurants and treated with contempt by strangers.

As a photographer and film-maker, he began documenting protests against racism by the Black Power movement in Britain, and became a campaigner himself. He interviewed its leaders and recorded the clashes between the authorities and black immigrants who turned up to celebrate the Notting Hill Carnival which in those days was banned. This record of black people's lives over five decades was recognised for its cultural significance yesterday when Ove received the [pound]30,000 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts.

During his career, Ove met and photographed Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Black Panthers in the US, Michael X, whose mentor was Malcolm X and who eventually became the leader of the Black Power movement in Britain. Other personalities caught on film include Alan Ginsberg, Darcus Howe, John Lennon and James Baldwin.

Ove, now aged 70, recalled the struggles of his early days in London, and said he encountered regular racist abuse.

"I struggled in London. I had travelled across Europe and lived in Rome, where people had been very kind and welcoming, and then I came to London. What made me politicised was a strong feeling of racism. You had the Windrush people come to work. They did-n't just come, they were invited, but people were very angry. You sensed this aggression, people would call you names and push you off the pavement, you couldn't get a job.

"I saw it and experienced it. I hadn't encountered this kind of racism before because I came from a very culturally mixed island," Ove said.

From its earliest incarnations, Ove began documenting the Notting Hill Carnival, adopted from the West Indian carnival tradition, which began in the 1960s as both a celebration and a protest.

"The carnival had a duality to it, in the same way it originally did in Trinidad, where the French put a carnival on to celebrate but the black slaves came out and used the carnival to demonstrate about their conditions and the way they were forced to live their lives.

"In some of my images of the Notting Hill Carnival, you see Windrush families with their younger daughters who are facing up to the police; these are the older women who freed up the carnival for the younger women to enjoy," he said.

His photographs chart the gentrification of Notting Hill from a deprived area to one of the most expensive districts in the capital today, and the growing diversity that the carnival began to attract over the decades.

There are street scenes where white youths who identify with the Black Power movement are involved in protests, while other images capture the first white people from the hippie generation who joined in with celebrations, to the multiculturalism of the carnival today.

In 1963, Ove made the first black British feature film, Pressure, on disaffected black youth, and still works to capture politically significant moments in Britain and abroad, including images of protests against the Iraq war.

Among the four other winners of the arts award was Gustav Metzger, 80, whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust. He created the "auto-destruct" paintings of the Sixties that forced viewers to confront images of Auschwitz, and made installations dealing with ecological issues. The other prize-winners were Gerard Byrne, Gareth Jones and Olivia Plender, who each receive [pound]30,000 over three years.

Last year's winners included the artist Michael Landy and the film-maker Clio Barnard.

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