A brief history of black photographers and publishing
Doing the research proved sobering—initially, I couldn’t even find 100 titles by black photographers, which plunged me into a depression. How could that be, in the 170 years or so of photography’s existence, could there have only ever been fewer than 100 books by or on black photographers? I sent out a survey to about 100 black photographers about their own experiences with publishing, and their responses were also sobering. But it was becoming more clear to me just how important publishing is and just how missing we are from the genre. Consider that the average duration of an exhibition is anywhere from a couple of weeks to, for original photographs, about 4 months, and most exhibitions only appear in a single venue, which may or may not be located where you are. Though photography books have relatively small print runs—usually between 1,000 and 5,000 copies—the potential for the circulation of images through the printed format is infinitely greater than that for any exhibition, even a touring one.
When I started researching, to be thorough I turned first to the sources that, as a journal editor, I routinely use in seeking new titles. According to its then-Editor, Darius Himes, the quarterly Photo-eye Booklist “surveys the photography book scene and culls the top 25-30 titles out of literally hundreds of books published each season. Never before has there been such widespread interest in the printed image.” So I combed carefully through the Booklist, looking for titles by black photographers. I looked, in fact, at every book reviewed or advertised from Spring 2005 through Fall 2007. During that time, only 4 titles by or about black photographers appeared in the Booklist:
· Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures
· Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography
· Un Autre Monde. (the catalog from the Bamako Biennale) VIes Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie
· Malick Sidibé: Photographs
And only 2 had been actually reviewed. I checked Distributed Art Publishers next. From Spring/Summer 2006 through Fall 2007, DAP’s catalogs included
·Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures
· African American Vernacular Photography (images of black subjects, not necessarily by black photographers)
· Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography
· Black Brown, White: Photography from South Africa
Next I checked Aperture’s booklist; Aperture publishes 30 titles per year with a maximum of 3 on emerging photographers, which makes it one of the largest photography book publishers in the business. Combing its 2007 catalogs, including the backlist, I discovered that Aperture has published one title by a black photographer: Bey’s Class Pictures.
That’s when I sent out the survey, which included these questions:
* How many books have you published as an artist?
* Of those, how many monographs?
* What were the years of publication?
* Have you ever self-published a book?
* If so, what was your print run?
* What was the cost?
* Have you ever paid out-of-pocket for a publication you did not self-publish (including grant money)?
* Have you ever earned a royalty on a publication?
* What is (are) the most recent book title(s) that you have seen by (a) black photographer(s)?Where do you usually learn about new book titles by black photographers?
* What is (are) your favorite book title(s) by (a) black photographer(s)?
When I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s, there were no African American art history courses where I studied, and black photographers weren’t fully integrated into the canon—their publications weren’t represented in our library, which also meant they weren’t in the slide library, which meant they weren’t shown in lectures or in any other way taught in the curriculum. In the era of websites, blogs, mySpace, Facebook, flickr, etc., it is in theory much easier to simply browse the Internet for images that can be quickly downloaded and, even at their low resolution, projected in the classroom. Yet a quick Google search of a list of twenty names of African-American photographers who were prominent in the 1980s yield few results for finding images, let alone personal pages.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1984 cover
The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955 cover
Perhaps the best-known book of African-American photography—the photography book equivalent of seeing the first black faces on television—is Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’ The Sweet Flypaper of Life, the first book published exclusively with work by a black photographer. Sweet Flypaper was a photography/text collaboration originally published in 1955, reprinted in 1967, and reissued by Howard University Press in 1984. According to photographer and photo historian Deborah Willis, at age seven, “sitting on the floor of her Philadelphia home, dreading the weekly ritual of her mother hot-combing her hair,”she saw a library copy of The Sweet Flypaper of Life. After, she assembled the family photo album trying to emulate the organization of images in Flypaper. It was, she recalls, the first time she had seen a book with photographs of black people, and the impact was life-changing. “I could see how much the people looked like my family.”
It was more than a decade before one of the next photography books by a black photographer was published: Gordon Parks published his first book about (not with his own) photography, Flash Photography, in 1947. In all, only 6 photography books were published by or about black photographers prior to 1970.
Harlem photographer James VanDerZee’s work had been introduced to a broader audience through the controversial Metropolitan Museum exhibition Harlem on My Mind in 1968, which despite the controversy would be the first experience for many seeing a black photographer’s credited images in a major museum exhibition.
Beyond DeCarava, Parks, and James VanDerZee, the early 1970s marked the first wave of exhibitions and publications of the work of emerging black photographers. Happening in the midst of the civil rights and Black Arts Movements, photography was the perfect medium of self-representation, poised to capture that defining historical moment. In the 1970s as these early photographers and publications were breaking new ground there were a handful of survey titles to preserve a record of exhibitions and more importantly to introduce the work of more black photographers to a broader audience. For promoting a previously untapped talent base, surveys were essential for cultivating an audience for their work. They were mostly slim publications, about 20–30 pages with maybe a single reproduction by each photographer.
Chief among these was photographer Joe Crawford, who published The Black Photographers’ Annual, the first of ultimately four volumes published between 1973 and 1980 devoted to publishing the work of contemporary African American photographers. 28 titles by or about black photographers were published in the 1970s.
Things began to change more rapidly in the mid-1980s; the decades of the 1980s and 1990s saw the greatest period of publication for books by black photographers, as historians had begun to research and construct a history which had not previously been documented, starting with Valencia Hollins Coar’s A Century of Black Photographers 1840-1960 from 1983,followed soon thereafter by Deborah Willis’ Black Photographers, 1840 – 1940: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography and An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, 1940 – 1988, two exhaustive encyclopedias of black photographers that expanded and updated Coar’s earlier research. In 1986 Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers was published, the first book devoted to the history of the careers of black women
photographers.
Increasingly the work of black photographers was being curated into conceptual exhibitions, many with catalogs, which moved beyond the introductory nature of earlier surveys to explore the conceptual underpinnings of the increasingly identity-based work of the period. These were perhaps more influential to young photographers like me, as the subject matter and formats were both moving beyond the traditional black and white two-dimensional “straight” documentary image. Two of the best are from 1989:
Black Photographers Bear Witness, 1989
Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social Protest and Constructed Images: New Photography with cover images by Christian Walker and Pat Ward Williams, respectively.
Though there were a handful of monographs in the 1980s and 32 books by or about black photographers published in that decade, the 1990s became the golden era of publishing for artists of color, whose early works in survey compilations helped make a name for them. The publishers and thus the intended audiences varied widely, ranging from self-published efforts—mostly artists’ books—to small non-profit gallery catalogs to museums to commercial presses. The overwhelming majority of titles are monographs, both theme books and fine-art publications. 74 books by or about black photographers were published in the 1990s.
As the 2000s debuted, it seemed the publishing would keep apace, with new anthologies, new titles by familiar names, long past due titles from others, and the introduction of new names. Surveys re-emerged, thicker and more comprehensive than ever.
The breadth of work being published is ever-expanding, and the numbers continue to increase—to date, 104 books by or about black photographers have been published (or are slated to be published) in the 00s. Initially, after consulting Photo-eye and DAP, I thought the number was dwindling, coinciding with the death within the art world and the academy, of multiculturalism and in this radical shift away from the art of identity politics—which largely though not exclusively means the work of artists of color. But actually counting the numbers is somewhat more encouraging. However, I definitely don’t think the art world is the best and only venue, and of late I have noticed browsing at hip style/design stores here in San Francisco that the only books they are selling by black artists are Kehinde Wiley’s Columbus and Jamel Shabazz’s Seconds of My Life. (at two separate stores; neither sold both) I would call it a crisis.
Recently, two young women who’d heard my lecture, Intisar & ABG, wrote to me about publishing the list of titles I’d compiled, which prompted me to go back, carefully looking so that I could add any additional titles that I’d missed. As Intisar wrote, she wanted to check them all out and also see what kind of books have been published and why? For what reasons? How many are photojournalism, how many are theme books, how many “fine art?” That prompted me to do a little quick assessment, too, to understand what that number means when it’s further broken down. What does it mean that just 6 photographers (DeCarava, Magubane, Parks, L. Simpson, VanDerZee, and Weems) account for about 1/3 (78) of the titles, or that just 55—around 20%—are books by or about women photographers (and of those, 20 are by only 2 photographers)? Or that in the history of the medium there have only been 55 books by black women photographers? Hopefully the compilation of this list will be the initiation of some serious inquiries. Needless to say, if you know of any titles that are not on the list, please E-mail me the bibliographic information (and ideally a scan of the cover if you have it). Especially if it’s your own title—artist’s book, self-published, one-of-a-kind—it’s all here.
Carla Williams
