Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography

"Can a mugshot capture the fraught history of white police violence against blacks? What does a nineteenth-century photo of a nude black woman tell us about sexuality, or about sexism? How does a child interpret a family portrait showing the members arranged from lightest to darkest? Which photo of Marcus Garvey has become the most famous, and why?"--the publisher. These and other questions are addressed by thirteen African-American artists, scholars and writers in Picturing Us, a collection of essays about the meanings inherent in photographs of African-Americans. Each writer chose a photograph that was important to them and wrote an essay about its historical and personal significance. The resulting work demonstrates that "in a nation obsessed with race and skin color, and haunted by its history of slavery and gross inequality, the photographic subject is especially complex--and that interpretation is far more than an academic exercise."--the publisher.