MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: For decades, Deborah Willis has been one of the country's foremost authorities on Black photography. The MacArthur genius award winner has dedicated her career to unearthing, cataloging and showcasing Black photographers and photographic images of Black people. This November, her seminal publication, "Reflections In Black: A History Of Black Photographers 1840 To The Present," has been reissued after a quarter century with 130 new images and a gallery show inspired by the book. I dropped by the busy hallways at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where she leads the photo department, to see the show and hear about some of her favorite images.
DEBORAH WILLIS: This is Michelle Obama in The Bronx hugging someone in the community there, just giving support for veterans, military veterans. So that's part of it.
MARTIN: Interesting. Michelle Obama has been so photographed. I was curious why this is the image that appealed to you.
WILLIS: The hug.
MARTIN: Oh, the hug. OK.
WILLIS: You know, the embrace. And I find that it's fascinating. Her eyes are closed. So you feel the sense of connection, the way that she's holding onto this older veteran. Not her face, just her gesture. It was something I felt was really important in that way.
MARTIN: It's interesting how often the American flag features in these photographers' work.
WILLIS: It is. It's because they're asking questions about, you know...
MARTIN: What's the relationship?
WILLIS: Right, what's the relationship?
MARTIN: Between us and this.
WILLIS: Right. But also about, you know, believing in their citizenship and their rights.
MARTIN: To learn more about her and the book, we moved to a slightly quieter space, where I asked her how her interest in photography began.
WILLIS: I grew up in Philadelphia, in North Philly. My mom had a beauty shop. My mom had, as I used to call it, the Black color wheel of magazines, Ebony, Jet, Tan. But also, they had Life, Look and National Geographic. So I was always looking at images as a child. My father was a amateur photographer, serious amateur. My father was also a policeman, and he also had a tailor shop. (Laughter) So fashion and dress fascinated me.
MARTIN: Is it true that this book actually started as a research project for an undergrad paper?
WILLIS: Yes. There were no Black photographers in the history books. I said, where are the Black photographers? And I knew there was the Black photographers' annual books that were circulating in New York and around a number of Black photographers.
MARTIN: I mean, also Ebony, Jet.
WILLIS: The Jets.
MARTIN: The magazines that you mentioned.
WILLIS: Exactly.
MARTIN: Iconic in the Black community. You could not go into a barbershop, beauty salon, any Black commercial space...
WILLIS: Right.
MARTIN: ...Without seeing these magazines. Somebody was taking those pictures.
WILLIS: Right, someone was taking, and I knew it. And I just started reading Black directories, city directories. And because of segregation in the 19th century, I was able to identify with the asterisk that said colored photographers. I was able, with all of the names that I compiled with my undergraduate paper, I was able to find images that were at the Schomburg and categorize them and create portfolios for each photographer.
MARTIN: How did it become this monumental project?
WILLIS: There's - I call him my publishing angel. His name was Richard Newman. And he said, how would you like to do a book on Black photographers? So I said, well, I have this and that. And he says, well, send it to me. And he read it, and he said, let's put this together and find the photographs to add to it. And that's how it started.
MARTIN: Even before photography was accessible to everybody, which it is now because you have a camera in your phone, Frederick Douglass, I think he was one of the most photographed people...
WILLIS: That's what we found, yes.
MARTIN: ...Of his era. What do you think he understood about the importance of being photographed?
WILLIS: I believe, in reading his words, that photography was biography. He was really concerned about the images of Black people that degraded Black people. And he wanted the images, to see his self-portraits that was in collaboration with the photographer, also is about humanity, in terms of making sure that they were human and seeing that.
MARTIN: And also, it's interesting you kind of - but there are also, you know, famous photographs not taken by Black people but taken for other purposes that show just the intensity of the degradation of the slavery experience. I'm thinking about this famous image of an enslaved man whose back is just crisscrossed with scars from being whipped. And I just wonder, when you see an image like that, what do you see or how do you experience it?
WILLIS: Yeah, I think it's the evidence of a lived experience and a horrific lived experience. And these human property images were on display to degrade Black people. They were also placed in world fairs. And that's why when I heard about years ago that W. E. B. Du Bois organized an exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition, I went to the Library of Congress looking. There's no - it didn't exist. And then 20 years later, someone who worked in the Library of Congress who was cataloging photographs, a young Black man, found the box of images. And I was able to have access to those images.
MARTIN: Whoa. After being told they didn't exist?
WILLIS: They didn't exist because they weren't processed. And Du Bois also knew the importance of photography. And he always asked, why aren't more Black men studying photography?
MARTIN: Also, too, you know, I'm thinking about a magazine like Ebony or Tan. There have been others, too, which existed to show that Black people live luxurious lives as well. That it wasn't just a life of, you know, toil. But, you know, remember the celebrities, you know? It was a big deal to see them with their furs, their cars, their houses.
WILLIS: Yeah. Right? It was important that photographers were there to document not only the activism, but also - and not only the mourning, but the beauty of Black life.
MARTIN: How did you think about this reframed edition?
WILLIS: When I started thinking about this book, how do I retell the story? How do we reinvent it, creating new narratives about their lives or imagining narratives? Like Amiri Baraka says, the imagination gives us possibilities. And so that's something that I was considering in looking at these photographs.
MARTIN: Professor Deborah Willis is the author of "Reflections In Black: A History Of Black Photographers 1840 To The Present." Its gallery show, "Reflections In Black: A Reframing," is on display at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts until December 21. Professor Willis, thank you so much.
WILLIS: Thank you.
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