Deborah Willis is one of the most important figures in American photography. Thomas Allen Harris’ 2014 documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photography and the Emergence of a People illustrated how her archival and curatorial skills have retrieved countless black images and their photographers from obscurity or the fate of being undervalued. Her work on books like “Reflections in Black” and “Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present” (among others) is a cornerstone of scholarship on black representation. The preceding two sentences run the risk of reducing her work to something dry and cerebral. Thumb through any collection she’s been involved with, though, and threaded through her insightful analysis and historicizing is Ms. Willis’ unflagging sense and appreciation of beauty, which is made clear in the images she carefully curates.
Deborah Willis; Blackamoor Workshop, Florence 2014
Many of those who’ve read the books she’s edited may not fully appreciate or even know about is Willis’ skill as a photographer in her own right. Fittingly, this month (Black History Month,) she’s releasing Beautiful, a book of her own photos, and the collection fits right in with the body of work she has already amassed. It’s an aesthetic and intellectual testimony to the beauty and resilience of global blackness, and the range of the black photographer’s eye. In assessing the book for Vogue.com, Harvard professor and author Sarah Lewis was quoted as saying, “For decades, she has been focused on photography from the African diaspora and African-American culture. Uniting her projects is a focus on the force of beauty in the history of modernism to both denigrate and memorialize humanity—pictures as document of the struggle for affirmation and dignity.”
Deborah Willis; Outside of Istanbul, 2010
