The first title in Aperture's Vision & Justice Series--featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.
Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combatting racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times's Lens blog, Berger's incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through story-telling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American-, Latinx-, Asian American-, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism.
Race Stories collects together Berger's reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them.
Co-published by Aperture and the New York Times.
Maurice Berger (born and died in New York, 1956-2020) was a cultural historian, curator, and writer, who spent much of his career studying and teaching racial literacy through innovative visual literacy projects. In influential essays, books, and provocative museum exhibitions, Berger gathered and presented compelling photographic images to engage and challenge readers and viewers into reconsidering both cultural and personal assumptions and prejudices. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (2000) and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2010), which was also was one of the premier projects mounted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and was nominated for an Emmy Award.
Leigh Raiford is professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) has for decades made groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. His numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020-22). Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently professor of art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. His books include Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Seeing Deeply (2018), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (Aperture, 2019), and Street Portraits (2021).
Sarah Lewis is the award-winning author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery and editor of "Vision & Justice," recipient of the Infinity Award and the Freedom Scholar Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and Carrie Mae Weems, winner of the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books. She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Deborah Willis is the author of Girlfriend on Mars and two acclaimed collections of short stories. Her work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Walrus, and Zoetrope, among other publications. She lives in Calgary, Canada.
- Publisher: Aperture
- Publish Date: December 17, 2024
- Pages: 272
- Language: English
- Type: Hardcover
- EAN/UPC: 9781597115629
- BISAC Categories: Individual Photographers - Essays, Photoessays & Documentaries, Subjects & Themes - Historical
