"They took me out of retirement because people think I've got an interesting life"

"Why did it take so long for one of Britain's greatest photographers to get his due?" asked the Guardian's Steve Rose about Charlie Phillips back in March. I'd like to say it's a mystery - but sadly racism seems the much likelier explanation. Hopefully his appearance at last weekend's Northern Eye Photography Festival will have helped to raise his profile.

We've got a drunk GI to thank for the fact that Phillips discovered the joys of photography in the first place. From that early awakening, his life took an extraordinary route that included learning his trade with the paparazzi in Rome, getting backstage with Jimi Hendrix and others at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, photographing Muhammad Ali the following year, having Henri Cartier-Bresson visit his first solo exhibition and finding himself homeless. If there's a greater tragedy than the loss of so many of his pictures (a consequence of moving from squat to squat), it's that between 1974 and 1991, he "didn't take a single photograph".

The son of Windrush immigrants, Phillips captured the realities of the Black British experience from the inside at a time when very few others were. "I think we're not well represented within the culture of England how we should be", he told Rose. "There has been a missing section in our history. Most of our records have been destroyed or weren't there in the first place ... I'm just here to document our side of the story ... It's not Black history; this is British history, whether you like it or not. And we've been sidestepped. I feel that personally."

And yet the Guardian decided to include the interview as part of a series called "Black Lives". Back to Phillips: "I feel sometimes I'm being used as political propaganda when they talk about multicultural Britain. I'm sorry, I don't want to play the colour game. I'm tired of ticking the boxes, because they only call you in Black History Month to show images of Black people, and I'm fed up of it."

Understandably so. Can we just start to talk about him as a fantastic photographer full stop?