In 1973, a small band of black artists published the Black Photographers Annual, Volume I, a book that changed the history of photography in America.
Author Archives: John Edwin Mason
John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. He is writing a critical study about Gordon Parks's photo-essays.
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A Chronicler of Philadelphia’s 20th-Century Black Life
Between the 1930s and ’60s, John W. Mosley made photographs without any expectation that white people would see them. His intended audience was black.
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Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison’s Collaborative Visions of Harlem
CHICAGO — Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison, two of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists, shared a vision of what it meant to be black in the US.
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A Photographer Who Captured the Complexity of Black Life in Lyrical Ways
Louis Draper resisted labels. He knew that they could confine, like boxes, but much worse, they might be like prison cells: impossible to escape.
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Celebrating Photographers of Color and the Collectives That Have Nurtured Them
“And who else is there?” A staff member at a well-known photo festival and I were nearing the end of an awkward conversation.
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Sculpting Photographs in Play-Doh
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia — Eleanor Macnair’s Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh are serious fun. Whether on Tumblr, where her re-imagined photographs first appeared, or in her recently published book of the same name, their cartoonish colors and shapes dazzle the eye.