About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherTemple University Press

ISBN-101566399289

ISBN-139781566399289

eBay Product ID (ePID)1913863

Product Key Features

Book TitleBlack Female Body : a Photographic History

Number of Pages240 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2002

TopicSubjects & Themes / Portraits & Selfies, Women's Studies

IllustratorYes

GenreSocial Science, Photography

AuthorDeborah Willis, Carla Williams

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Weight59.2 Oz

Item Length12 in

Item Width9 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2001-034719

Reviews"This publication-copiously illustrated and rigorously researched-demonstrates the complexities of deconstructing images of females of African descent within the medium of photography. Deborah Willis and Carla Williams demonstrate how the paradigm of the gaze, the idioms of subjectivity, agency and identity, and the modality of the observer versus the observed falter in the case of black women-slave/free, gay/straight, worker/bourgeoisie-and mutate when race and economics interface with gender and sexual preference. This invaluable study will be the starting point for future research and will explode the consciousness of practitioner, subject and patron with regard to the politics of imagery." -Lowery Stokes Sims, PhD, Director, The Studio Museum in Harlem"Deborah Willis and Carla Williams are uniquely qualified guides to the taboo subject of the black female body. As highly educated black women who are also trained artists they bring an informed and sensitive perspective to a subject that has never before been studied from a historical and aesthetic viewpoint. They have sleuthfully pursued images of black women in collections around the world and have gathered the very best and most important examples into this anthology. As good historians they use the past as a map for the present. We find reproduced and analyzed here examples from the earliest photographs of black women by European photographers of the 1840s, to Edward Weston in California of the 1930s, to Lorna Simpson in New York of the 1990s. It will be a long time before this book is surpassed." -Weston Naef, Curator of Photographs, The J. Paul Getty Museum"A fascinating and complex journey through a heretofore unlit passage of the history of photography. Well-documented for scholarly use but highly readable. Recommended for anyone interested in a broader understanding of the powerful relationship between representation and culture." -Katherine C. Ware, Curator of Photographs, The Philadelphia Museum of Art"The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, with its superlative introductory essay by Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, impacts many of our conventional views, and it does so with substantial force. An astonishing collection of previously unfamiliar images, the book compels us to re-imagine much of what we thought we knew about African and African American history and culture." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University"The Black Female Body: A Photographic History is an invaluable source book for artists and scholars who are interested in how image technologies have shaped our vision of the world and its inhabitants. Some of the photographs in the book are well known while others emerge for public viewing for the first time in decades. Still, the power of this book lies in the editors' efforts to bring all these photographs together and assess the multiple relationships among them. In doing so they have uncovered a racial grammar that runs across genres, continents, and historical periods. This is truly groundbreaking work." -Coco Fusco, Associate Professor School of the Arts, Columbia University"[A] meticulous presentation of old photos...urging a reevaluation of the modes and means by which the iconic figure of the black female body has been constructed." -Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts

TitleLeadingThe

Dewey Edition21

Photographed byWillis, Deborah

Dewey Decimal779/.24/08996

Table Of ContentPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: Colonial Conquest1. La Venus Noire2. Ethnography, Photography, and the Grand Tour3. The Body at Labor4. World's Fairs and Expositions5. The National Geographic AestheticPart II: The Cultural Body6. The Noble Body7. The Conscious Body8. The Artist's Model9. Bawdy Bodies10. The Lesbian Body11. The Body at Labor, RevisitedPart III: The Body Beautiful12. The New Negro in Photography13. Perception of Beauty14. The Construction of Beauty15. Autobiography of the BodyConclusion: Reclaiming Bodies and Images>p>NotesReferencesIndexColor plates

SynopsisSearching for photographic images of black women, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams were startled to find them by the hundreds. In long-forgotten books, in art museums, in European and U.S. archives and private collections, a hidden history of representation awaited discovery. The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs, showing how photographs reflected and reinforced Western culture's fascination with black women's bodies.In the nineteenth century, black women were rarely subjects for artistic studies but posed before the camera again and again as objects for social scientific investigation and as exotic representatives of faraway lands. South Africans, Nubians, enslaved Abyssinians and Americans, often partially or completely naked and devoid of identity, were displayed for the armchair anthropologist or prurient viewer. Willis and Williams relate these social science photographs and the blatantly pornographic images of this era with those of black women as domestics and as nursemaids for white children in family portraits. As seen through the camera lens, Jezebel and Mammy took the form of real women made available to serve white society.Bringing together some 185 images that span three centuries, the authors offer counterpoints to these exploitive images, as well as testaments to a vibrant culture. Here are nineteenth century portraits of well-dressed and beautifully coifed creoles of color and artistic studies of dignified black women. Here are Harlem Renaissance photographs of entertainer Josephine Baker and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Documenting the long struggle for black civil rights, the authors draw on politically pointed images by noted photographers like Dorothea Lange, Louis Hines, and Gordon Parks. They also feature the work of contemporary artists such as Ming Smith Murray, Renee Cox, Coreen Simpson, Chester Higgins, Joy Gregory, and Catherine Opie, who photograph black women asserting their subjectivity, reclaiming their bodies, and refusing the representations of the past.A remarkable history of the black woman's image, The Black Female Body makes an exceptional gift book and keepsake. Author note: Deborah Willis is Professor of Photography in the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and the author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present. >P>Carla Williams is a writer and photographer.

LC Classification NumberTR674.W55 2002