Black Photographers Book Reviews » catalogue

Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits (Smithsonian, 2007)

Carla — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:29:51 +0000

Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits. Deborah Willis, USMTH (Smithsonian); 1 edition, July 2007, 176 pages, 12.3 x 9.2 x 1.1 inches, ISBN-10: 1588342425/ ISBN-13: 978-1588342423, hardcover, US $35.

African American Vernacular Photography (Steidl/ICP, 2006)

Carla — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:16:16 +0000

African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection, Steidl/ICP, March 2006, 120 pages, 11 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches, ISBN-10:3865212255; ISBN-13: 978-3865212252, US $25.

From the publisher’s site:

This book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same title on view at the International Center of Photography, presents an extraordinary group of images of African Americans in a variety of genres and poses: formal studio portraits, casual snapshots, images of children, images of uniformed soldiers, wedding portraits, so-called “Southern-views” made for tourist consumption. While some of the sitters are celebrities of the day, the majority are unnamed Americans posing for their photographic portrait. They attest to photography’s ability to both record personal history for private uses and to been seen as a document of history in a wider context.

The collection of about 1600 photographs date from 1860 to 1960 and was given to ICP in 1990 by Daniel Cowin. The images span a range of processes and formats — postcards, stereographs, cartes-de-visite, tintypes, albumen prints, and gelatin silver prints. Together they provide an important window into African American life during the period. The book will reproduce seventy color plates from the collection and includes essays by Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis and an annotated checklist.

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (University of Washington Press, 2008)

Carla — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:56:40 +0000

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body. Edited by Barbara Thompson, University of Washington Press with Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2008, 376 pp., 250 illus., 212 in color, notes, bibliog., index, 9 x 12 in. ISBN: Paper: 0-295-98771-5/ 978-0-295-98771-2; Cloth: 0-295-98770-7/ 978-0-295-98770-5, Paper: US $50.00, Cloth: US $75.00.

Though not strictly photography, this is the catalog of an exhibition that originated at the Hood Museum in New Hampshire earlier this year; I contributed an essay to the catalogue and images to the show (but the reproduction of my work in the catalogue is terrible–I wish someone has told me and asked me to replace the file–ugh!). I was so thrilled to see one of Maud Sulter’s images on the cover, only to be shocked soon after with news of her premature death. Overall, this is a well-illustrated catalogue with lots of terrific work. From the publisher’s site:

Explorations of contemporary art have focused on issues of identity and race for some time. Few, however, have sought to investigate these themes by juxtaposing historical and contemporary frameworks. Black Womanhood examines an especially charged icon – the black female body – and contemporary artists’ interventions upon historical images of black women as exotic Others, erotic fantasies, and supermaternal Mammies.

This book presents icons of the black female body as seen from three separate but intersecting perspectives: the traditional African, the colonial, and the contemporary global. The display and contemplation of such iconic images addresses complex and often competing forces of self-presentation and the representation of others. Peeling back layers of social, cultural, and political realities, Black Womanhood explores how historic icons inform contemporary artistic responses to the black female body through an examination of themes such as beauty, fertility and sexuality, maternity, and women’s roles and power in society.

More than 200 historical and contemporary images accompany written contributions by artists, curators and scholars. This compelling volume makes a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions of race, gender, and sexuality by promoting a deeper understanding of past and present readings of black womanhood, both in Africa and in the West.

Barbara Thompson is curator of African, Oceanic, and Native American collections at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. The other contributors are Ifi Amadiume, Ayo Abietou Coly, Christraud Geary, Enid Schildkrout, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Carla Williams, and Deborah Willis.