Reflections In Black: A History
of Black Photographers 1840
to the Present

by Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor

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All at once, Reflections In Black by Deborah Willis (W.W. Norton & Company, 348 pp.) is history, narrative, a personal and public record, cultural anthropology and a family album. With nearly 600 photographs by African American men and women from 1840 to the present, it is a sweeping documentation of a diverse people's collective cultural vision and voice.

The photographers speak by choosing where they point their lens and when they click the shutter. The subjects speak too. What Deborah Willis has offered here, and in the companion traveling exhibit of the same name, is a meditation on what it has meant for African Americans to see themselves.

When photography was in its infancy, most early black photographers were business people. They were expanding portraiture to the masses who could not afford to pay a painter. On the other side of the lens, non-enslaved blacks chose to create their own images as dignified and striving people. When they brought their hard-earned money to a photographer, they wanted a marker of their survival and success.

There was family: upstanding men and women posing stiffly in cities from Richmond, Virginia to Helena, Montana for pioneering artists such as Augustus Washington or J.P Ball. There were pictures of chubby-faced babies and wrinkled grandmothers. The subjects did not intentionally make themselves into a study of slavery, race or racism. If they became so, it happened as they focused on their humanity. Their humanity is what they saw, despite popular and abundant images that depicted sons and daughters of Africa as subhuman.

In the early part of the last century, leading to the Harlem Renaissance and the era of the "New Negro," the family portrait expanded to include images of leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, taken by the growing ranks of black photographers including the prolific C.M. Battey and A.P. Bedou. There are the first crowd shots, one with Washington grinning in that self-satisfied manner that you've seen one hundred preachers grin—when they know they have the crowd in the palm of their hand.

Willis moves through this history with insightful essays beginning the sections covering each era. Visually compelling photography books like this one can struggle mightily against the text, drawing us, instead, to just flip through the images. Though the temptation to do so is strong here, Willis rewards readers with her diligent research, the culmination of more than 25 years of work as a curator and author. Her text adds insight to the photographs and is strongest in the early sections devoted to the fascinating history of early photographers. Much of the later text, though informative, reads less like a narrative and more like a laundry list of biographies.

As blacks began to work as photojournalists for black publications in the 1930's, the family portrait expanded to include more social and political events, as well as social conditions. The African American Gothic became Gordon Parks' photo series of an impoverished Washington, D.C cleaning woman. The Washington, D.C.-based Schurlock Studios snaps Marion Anderson in her historic moment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or Dr. Charles Drew with students at Howard University. Charles Stewart's portraits of Eric Dolphy and John and Alice Coltrane are as contemplative and lyrical as the musicians' art.

This documentation of the larger social stage increased during the turbulent civil rights and black power movements of the 1950's through the 1970's. Included here is Robert L. Haggins' haunting photograph of Malcolm X outside a Harlem housing project, standing with two young ministers, including Loius Farrakhan. Thankfully, Moneta J. Sleet's famous portrait of Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral is a part of this collection. Unlike almost all of Sleet's work held by Johnson Publishing (publishers of Ebony and Jet), which tragically will not grant permission for use of his work, this portrait is available because it was sold to the Associated Press.

Since that era, as more universities have offered degrees in photography, and increased opportunities have opened up for African Americans in diverse fields, there have been more blacks producing photography as fine art. There has also been an explosion in the number of young photojournalists, who are not well-represented in the final and largest section of the book. This section includes fine artists who experiment with combining photo images with other media, such as paint and found objects like chair seats and leaves. They produce photographs of their shadows and nude bodies, and scrawl lettering across the finished surfaces.

Artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Renee Cox use images to make statements that are both highly personal and relevant to the larger community. In her series, "Not Manet's Type," Weems comments on how black women's bodies are seen and not seen.

These artists allow the history of black photography to come full circle, as they use a wide range of tools, techniques and voices to create and see their own reflection.

-- June 29, 2001

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