Re-framing the Black Image
Charlotte Abbott -- 7/10/00
Photography collection exposes hidden facets of 160 years of
African-American life
 | On the cover: a crowd listening to
Booker T. Washington in 1910. |
For Deborah Willis, it's been a long journey from her days as a photography student in 1972, when she first noticed there were no black photographers in the books assigned for her classes, to winning one of this year's MacArthur "Genius" awards for her pioneering efforts to collect photographic images of two centuries of African-American life. The award, and the intense blaze of media exposure that has accompanied it, came just days after her latest book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (W.W. Norton) landed in bookstores on June 12. This week the book is expected to garner more attention as an extraordinarily popular exhibit featuring many of the book's photos leaves the Smithsonian, after five months, for a three-year national tour.
The first comprehensive history of African-American photography, Willis's lush, oversized volume features 600 photos by 120 photographers, from Jules Lion (1810-1866), who introduced the daguerreotype process to New Orleans in 1840, to contemporary artists Lyle Ashton Harris and Carrie Mae Weems. The book features not only familiar images of sharecroppers, political orators and jazz stars, but speckled daguerreotypes of cultured men in elegant suits, a 1920s portrait of crisp black debutantes and the bold image of a young woman in a brilliant white dress wading into a baptismal river in 1986, among other rare and intimate visions of African-American life.
 | Among the contemporary photos
is this 1990 image of
a Moslem woman. |
"When they see the photos, people are surprised by their diversity," said Willis, the first scholar to explore African-American photography 25 years ago, according to her editor, Robert Weil. "People say they have never seen this kind of three-dimensional image of black subject matter, images of a black middle class that has been ignored in the visual sense," Willis added. More than 100 of the photos have never before been published or displayed. As New York Times art critic Vicki Goldberg noted, many such images were neglected by the white press until after the civil rights era, while such recent photographic histories as Beaumont Newhall's History of Photography and Jonathan Green's American Photography: A Critical History (1984) excluded black photographers altogether.
Since 1992, Willis has worked as a curator at the Center for African-American History and Culture and the Anacostia Museum, which is part of the Smithsonian. This weekend the entire companion exhibit to Reflections in Black will move to America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wis., before its thematic sections--"The First Hundred Years," "Art and Black Activism" and "Black History Deconstructed"--are split up for display over the next three years in Albany, N.Y.; Brunswick, Maine; Harlem in New York City; Buffalo, N.Y.; Richmond, Va.; Springfield, Mass.; and Nashville, Tenn.
 | Reflections in Black chronicles
both the everyday and
the extraordinary images. |
"The Smithsonian exhibit gives people the opportunity to see the images and be startled by them," said Elizabeth Reilly, the book's publicist. "Our feeling is that the most important thing is to get the book into people's hands. At BEA, everyone was blown away by it. It captures elements of the black experience in America that shatter stereotypes." Norton has cultivated interest in the book--which has a first printing in the "strong five figures" and sales to Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club--among a select group of African-American and top print and broadcast media, building on the publicity surrounding the exhibit, and now the MacArthur award. As the show travels around the country, the house will work with local media and plan events with some of the photographers featured in the book.
Willis told PW she was stunned when she learned of the MacArthur award and its no-strings stipend of $100,000 a year for five years. "It was never part of my frame of reference." she said. "I went from euphoria to an incredible humbling, to be placed in such amazing company." On June 13, she appeared with a handful of other winners on Nightline, while the Washington Post, New York Times, ABC News and CBS Sunday Morning, among others, lined up for interviews.
For an author who is hailed by those who worked with her on the book for her down-to-earth warmth, as well as for her scholarly integrity, the origins of this project are especially appropriate. "This book was conceived at my kitchen table," said agent Faith Childs, who hosted a dinner party at which she seated Weil, then an executive editor at St. Martin's Press, next to her friend Thelma Golden, who worked at the Whitney Museum. When the conversation turned to photography and Weil expressed interest in commissioning a comprehensive history of black photographers, Golden told him without hesitation that Deborah Willis was the person to talk to. In roughly a week, Weil had struck a deal with Childs, a longtime friend of Willis's, for a book of photographs accompanied by a detailed historical overview.
When Weil moved to Norton in 1998, he brought the book with him, and acknowledges that St. Martin's was "generous in the end" to let it go. At Norton, it grew from 350 to 600 photos, 100 of which are reprinted in insets amid Willis's commentary on each historical period. Weil was relieved that the house did not insist that he adhere to the original photo count, although Willis said she still found it hard to turn away photographers who had flocked to the project.
With Weil at the center, Norton's team took immediately to the difficult task of organizing the project. Longtime Norton book designer Antonia Krass, an LMP nominee and winner of seven American Institute of Graphic Arts Awards, worked intensively on the design and preparation of the photos for more than eight months, while Weil's assistant Neil Giordano corralled the permissions and kept track of the photos. Meanwhile, v-p of trade production Andy Marasia enlisted Mondadori to print the book in Italy, allowing Norton to keep the price at $50. "On a commercial level, this book is a great gift," said Weil, "while on an intellectual level, it's teaching history through photography."
"This is truly a special book," added Anacostia Museum director Steven Newsome. "On top of those who are making repeat visits to the show, we have security guards and people who work in the museum feeling this is a book they just have to own. Now that d sn't happen with every exhibit."
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