Posted 21 October 2003

With over 600 photographs of African-American life, Reflections in Black undoubtedly takes the centre stage among the numerous volumes concerned with the intersection of African-American Studies and photography. What Reflections in Black adds to this ever-expanding corpus is its focus on the images produced by nineteenth century and early twentieth century African-American photographers. Although, as Willis remarks in her introduction, “African-Americans have produced photographs since 1840”, very little research and analysis have been carried out on the early years of African-American photographers. 

While Willis’s volume illustrates African-American life up to the present, the editor makes a strong case for devoting critical attention to the neglected beginnings of black photography. Working in a racist environment where black people were represented according to visual stereotypes, early black photographers accomplished the crucial task to counter these depictions “by making representative portraits of their subjects”. Early black photography, “often focused on the free black communities throughout the country”, contradicted the assumptions about the helplessness of African-Americans and presented them as confident human beings. This focus on the political and social use of the photograph is constant throughout the book and builds on Bell Hooks’s insight that “the camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us created by white folks”.

This recovery of the African-American photographic past does not only take the form of a recovery of previously uncollected material. Willis skilfully reconstructs an African-American photographic tradition so that even photographers of the contemporary post-modern period “recall the nineteenth-century photographers” as they are “chroniclers of their communities” who “have discovered the intersection of the private and public in the art”.

A comprehensive and engaging survey of African-American photography, Reflections in Black will be useful in different teaching contexts. It will be certainly valuable to course on the history and theory of the photographic medium and Willis’s analysis is always well aware of the multi-layered dimension of photography. As Roland Barthes put it in Camera Lucida, photography calls for a contamination “between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology and of psychoanalysis” and “a desperate resistance to any reductive system”. Yet Reflections in Black can be used productively also for History and Literature classes as it provides striking visual images that are often very effective means of capturing our students’ attention.

Order this book Today