Deborah Willis’ Posing Beauty, a collection of striking images of African Americans over the last century.
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Deborah Willis is determined to put the beauty of being black at the forefront of discussion, and in her new book, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, she makes a compelling argument.
What started out as a curiosity and fascination with representations of black beauty soon became a determination to create a thorough documentation of how black people were, as one reviewer puts it, “defined, exploited, manipulated, and marketed” through photography in the last century.
In her book, Willis, who currently serves as chair of the Photography and Imaging Department at the Tisch School of the Arts and is a professor at New York University, has put together 10 years of research into a stunning collection of images. Pulled from vintage magazines, journals, newspapers and other documents, over 200 images, both historical, contemporary and everywhere in between, are included that take a deep look at how race interacts with issues of class, gender, sexuality and ideas of beauty.
Gathering images from master photographers like Lee Friedlander, Carl van Vechten, Eve Arnold and Carrie Mae Weems, Willis juxtaposes candid shots in barbershops with glossy portraits of famous celebrities, an effect that forces viewers to question America’s representations of African Americans.
Among the people photographed are leaders from the civil rights era like Angela Davis, Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali, as well as rarely-before-seen pictures of historical figures like Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday. The collection also features images of contemporary entertainers and politicians like Denzel Washington, Lil’ Kim, Ray Charles, James Brown, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and the Obama family.
To see the amazing collection of photographs all in one place, check out the new book, Posing Beauty.