“Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People” is a feature length, documentary and multimedia outreach project that explores how African American communities have used the medium of photography to construct political, aesthetic, and cultural representations of themselves and their world. 

Photographic Portraits of People Opens at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art An exhibition featuring more than 100 original photographic portraits of people of color opened yesterday at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The exhibition, “Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection,” is a series of portraits taken over the past 100

“On one occasion I stumbled upon THE SWEETFLYPAPER OF LIFE and proudly brought it home…. I was excited to see the photographs: it was the first book I had ever seen with ‘colored’ people in it – people that I recognized, people that reminded me of my own family…. The photographs spoke to me in [...]

Lyle Ashton Harris: Self/Portrait brings together a group of large-format Polaroid photographs of the artist’s friends, family and community; artists, art collectors and patrons; and the artist himself. Shot over a ten-year period from 1998 to 2008, the sepia-toned “Chocolate Polaroids” capture the faces and backs of more than two hundred individuals. Harris (b. 1965) [...]

Lorna Simpson: Gathered presents works that explore this Brooklyn-born artist’s interest in the interplay between fact and fiction, identity and history. Through works that incorporate hundreds of original and found vintage photographs of African Americans that she collects from eBay and flea markets, Lorna Simpson undermines the assumption that archival materials are objective documents of history. January 28–August [...]

This article addresses the visual image of Dred Scott in the public imagination particularly through the photographic portrait of Scott made in 1857. Limited by the not yet developed technology to print photographs in newspapers, this photograph was not published when the landmark 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford

African-American families have been descending on the San Diego History Center for the last few months, leafing through mid-20th-century photographs of their ancestors and relatives. The History Center owns about 30,000 negatives and prints by Norman Baynard, a self-trained African-American photographer, and is now trying to identify his clients. Mr. Baynard ran a photo studio [...]

Marriage Equality:  Byron Rushing and the Fight for Fairness A world premiere film and community Discussion Presented in partnership with Chimpanzee Productions Tue, April 26, 7:30 pm | Tickets $10 | Aaron Davis Hall Buy Tickets Here Join us for the World Premiere of the documentary short, “Marriage Equality: Byron Rushing and the Fight for [...]

By: Trent Kelley, playwright & poet Sometimes it is difficult to write without anger. Pretending or denying that certain controversial truths do not exist, for the purpose of catering to a saccharine political correctness, wanting to make an individual comfortable, is dishonest. Transfiguring a string of independent words into coherent whole sentences

By Deborah Willis, Ph.D. New York University When I grew up in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 60s, the camera was a central element in our lives.  My family treasured their past—as evidenced in their ability to tell stories and preserve objects, recordings, clothing, and photographs.  After my father’s death in 1990, I revisited photographs [...]