When Dr Deborah Willis was an undergrad student at the Philadelphia College of Art, she asked the question that informed her work for years to follow: “Where are all the Black photographers?”
From photos by Gordon Parks in Time magazine to Black image-makers capturing daily life in Ebony and Jet magazines – she knew that Black photographers, like her father, were making their impact on the world. Growing up, her father was an amateur photographer, and her father’s cousin owned a photo studio, and seeing them photograph people as a child created a desire in her to become an image-maker.
At seven years old, she discovered the book The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava; upon seeing its cover image, she had a revolution. “Fast forward, I wanted to be a photographer,” she says.
Ultimately, her passion for photography would result in pioneering research for her in-depth undergrad paper, which included about 300 names and works by Black photographers. Publisher Richard Newman would recognize the importance of her findings, and together in 2000 they would create Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers: 1840 to the Present – the first comprehensive history of Black photographers.
Their book reshaped the narrative of America through showcasing to the nation images that centered the point of view and life of the everyday Black person in the moments in which they were facing discrimination and subjected to subhuman treatment.
On 18 November, a new edition of the book will be released; in coordination she has curated an exhibit titled Reflections in Black: A Reframing on view in New York City. Willis is now a professor and chair of the photography and imaging department at New York University and its Center for Black Visual Culture Institute for African American Affairs. She has also published many other books and held several teaching positions and, in a full circle moment, she was curator of photographs and prints at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture which served as her guiding light as she did her undergrad research.
She hopes Reflections in Black allows people to rethink their stereotypes of Blackness. “I want people to see that this work that the artists are making is about freedom, freedom to express that voice that James Baldwin always talked about,” she says. “Freedom to think of progress and to see the new narratives that are not based on others who only see Black people as othered and demeaning … and see it as an intervention.”
Throughout the book, she guides the audience through pivotal moments that informed the image-making process of Black photographers. First, daguerreotypes invented by Louis Daguerre were the first successful photographic process introduced to the public in 1839. This new image-making technique that shaped photography from 1840 to 1900 allowed Black photographers such as James P Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington to make portraits of the everyday African American.
From 1900 to 1940, Black photographers started to have their own studios, allowing photography to become more accessible during a time in which Black people were facing segregation and discrimination.
“One need only peruse the visual representations of Black people commonly produced on postcards and sheet music to realize that the exaggerated features and demeaning situations depicted there left an enduring negative impact, one that has endured to this day,” Willis writes in Reflections in Black. “Most of their African American clients wanted to celebrate their achievements and establish a counter-image that conveyed a sense of self and self-worth.”
From 1930 to 1940, Black photographers such as Gordon Parks, Vera Jackson, and Arthur Eddie Williamson began working as photojournalists for local newspapers and magazines, such as Our World, Ebony, Sepia and Flash, which were marketed to Black readers. Their photographs became a more comprehensive coverage of political events and protests, with the help of smaller handheld cameras in the 1930s.
Black image-makers in the 1950s to 1960s, such as Doug Harris, Elaine Tomlin, and Bobo Fletcher, began to study photography in workshops, art schools, and community centers. “Many of these photographers were determined to awaken social consciousness,” Willis notes in the first edition of Reflections in Black. “Their work is a testimony to the depth of understanding and love these photographers have for humanity.”
From the 1980s to the 1990s, work by photographers such as Coreen Simpson began to be viewed as fine art, combining graphic abstraction and conceptual photography. Many of these images were “informed by their families and explored how they dealt with social issues like racism, unemployment, and child and sexual abuse”, Willis writes. Photographers ask their viewers to “contextualize his or her own experience within the visual referents offered by the photographer, and in doing so to find her or his own historical perspective, interpretation, or meaning in these works”, Willis writes.
Currently, she is intrigued by photographers who are asking difficult questions about their personal and family lives while creating abstract photographs and using colors to photograph their environment. “Photographers are documenting, but they’re also making and asking questions about the future,” she says. “At the same time, they’re finding ways to celebrate the lives that have been lived and using new technologies to make three-dimensional images, making them monumental.”
The Black New Vanguard, a term coined by Antwaun Sargen, a writer, editor and curator, recognizes the current decision by photographers like Tyler Mitchell and Adama Delphine Fawundu to move photography forward by adding film-making, memory studies and historical references to their process. Willis says in this movement, “you just find pleasure, you just find passion, and so I see that in some other ways that the new vanguard, that they are looking at ways to find pleasure and joy in their experiences, as they experience the difficult moments”.
As the photographers adapted and changed their style, for Willis the concept of beauty has an everlasting presence in the work of Black image-makers. She began to notice the presence of everyday beauty in her mother’s salon growing up. “I learned beauty matters for women of all ages and all disciplines,” she says. But her experiences in 2001, transformed how she defined beauty. That year was a “shocking, awful, and surprising experience”, as she describes it.
After winning the MacArthur award that year, her 27-year-old nephew was killed during an altercation at a nightclub in Philadelphia when he was on his way to help her install an art exhibit she curated in DC. The first thing she said to herself upon hearing about his death was, “These kids did not know love. How could you not know love? How could they not see his beauty? How could that happen?”
Months later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and as a result she began to lose her hair, and noticed how uncomfortable people became with her bald head and lack of eyebrows. “Even in illness, beauty is important, because people would say some horrible things, and be insensitive to the fact that I’m dealing with my mortality,” she notes.
“I thought about Toni Morrison and her work, and she said, ‘Beauty is,’ and then just those two words meant so much to me,” she says. “I started thinking about images from the 19th century, how Black women who were enslaved, how they began to adorn themselves, and why it was important for them to see themselves as human.”
In the new edition of Reflections in Black, she continues her mission by not portraying beauty as a performance, but by illuminating the quiet everyday moments of Black life that are full of hope, struggle, resilience and joy
“I’m hoping people will see that [Black] people are not performing” Willis says. “[and] that we are human.”
Reflections in Black: A Reframing is now on display at New York University’s Cooper Square Gallery until 15 October
