Dr. Willis is voorzitter van de afdeling Fotografie en Beeldvorming aan de Tisch School of the Arts van New York University. Zijn expertise duikt in de artistieke en theoretische dimensies van visuele cultuur.
Featuring over 500 stunning black-and-white photographs, this collection honors the rich tapestry of black culture in American history. It captures iconic figures like Jesse Owens, Ella Fitzgerald, Barry Bonds, and Halle Berry, showcasing their contributions and the impact of their legacies. The book serves as a powerful visual narrative that celebrates the achievements and resilience of the black community across various fields, making it a significant tribute to cultural heritage.
Tyler Mitchell explores the concept of a black utopia through his work as a photographer and filmmaker. Gaining recognition after photographing Beyoncé for Vogue in 2018, he challenges the dominant perspectives of the white majority and aims to create an independent narrative for people of color.
In twelve intensely personal, interconnected essays, Emily Bernard sets out to tell stories from her life that enable her to talk about truth, race, family and relationships, and much more. She observes the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America's New England today. Ultimately, she shows us that it is in our shared experience of humanity that we find connection, happiness and hope
A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers.. Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed-marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier, Deb Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged... With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials Willis not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle-from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing responsibility and fear commitment and patriotism and-most predominantly-African American resilience... The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance
