Deborah Willis

Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel

Portfolio of Artwork 981-984

One phrase or one word is too limited to describe Deborah Willis (b. 1948, Philadelphia, PA), for she engages in multiple professional activities in which her performance in each can only be described as exceptional, spectacular, sterling, superb—you choose the word(s). No wonder that in 2000 the MacArthur Foundation judiciously decided to make her a MacArthur Fellow, or put another way, to bestow on her its “genius grant.” She has earned the BFA from Philadelphia College of Art (1975), the MFA from Pratt Institute (1979), the MA from City College of New York (1986), and the PhD from George Mason University (2001). She is author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits (2007), Family History Memory: Recording African American Life (2005), Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000), Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (1994), Early Black Photographers, 1840-1940: 23 Postcards (1992), and co-author of many others. In 2014, she co-produced Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, a documentary film. Photographer, professor, curator, art historian, artist, academic administrator, art critic, cultural theorist—these are but a few of the titles Deborah Willis enjoys. For her achievements she has received a number of other honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), a Fletcher Fellowship (2005), and an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Writing in Photography (1995). She is currently employed at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University as Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography.

Were it not for Deborah Willis an invaluable segment of American cultural, social, and political histories might have gone overlooked or neglected or lost. I am thinking of what is revealed in neglected, unstudied photography and film. For it is through her superb critical work on these two genres that she has recovered and informed us of, and recorded and reprinted for us, images from the past in her published cultural histories, which discuss early and recent photos and films that serve not only as pieces of memories but also as images indirectly interrogating the times and circumstances during which they were represented through lenses. It is no doubt that her studying and writing about these recorded “memories” has led her to assume other cultural roles, one of which is that of the fine art (and documentary) photographer.

What she tells LeRonn P. Brooks about her work as a photographer in his July 1, 2015, interview with her is indeed of import here. She tells him, “My work deals with storytelling. The history of storytelling within the African American traditions, but also the idea of visual storytelling.” And she continues.

WILLIS:

I studied photography at the Philadelphia College of Art in the 1970s, and then in graduate school at Pratt Institute later. I have always worked within the tradition of visual storytelling so my intention is to make connections between the history of African American culture and the history of beauty. I grew up in the beauty shop and it was the subject of my work when I was younger. I’ve returned to the subject recently and have been following people like Carrie Mae Weems and others who have treated the subject. So that’s the intentionality behind my work, exploring the relationship between these two ideas. When I was growing up I used to sit on the floor and listen to women talk about their lives, their hopes, and about their disappointments. I was a kid but I understood that there was something central and important about these experiences. And recently I started noticing a connection in my work [to those experiences] to images like this image of Carrie Weems (as she looks into a mirror) in a beauty shop in Eatonville [Florida]. Mirrors are central to this work in terms of the idea of self-reflection and looking for self-approval, and the embracing of one...