Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography - Softcover

Deborah Willis is curator of exhibitions at the National African American Museum Project of the Smithsonian Institute. Her previous books include Early Black Photographers: 1840 to 1940 and VanDerZee: Photographer 1886–1983. She lives in Washington, D.C.

For this book, Willis invited 18 writers, critics, and filmmakers to select a photograph they found personally or historically significant and to provide an analysis of their selection. The contributors include Adele Alexander, Angela Davis, Kathe Sandler, Slarissa Sligh, bell hooks, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and the images they chose include treasured family portraits, a lynching, a stylish woman of the Harlem Renaissance, a famous 19th-century propaganda piece designed to help recently freed slaves from New Orleans, and a daguerreotype portrait of a black child holding a white baby. By chance, the result is a small sampling from each period of African American history since the invention of photography. Willis (VanDerZee: A Photographic History, LJ 11/15/93), who is associated with the Smithsonian Institution's National African American Museum Project, is known for her ground-breaking research and writing on the subject of African American photography. Recommended for photography and African American studies collections.
Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn
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