"Church Ladies, taken in Zambia in 1986, contains a similarly buoyant gaze. A woman raises her arms, her face lit in a broad smile, displaying a rapture so contagious it matters little if most parts of the picture are shadowy or if her fellow worshippers seem less showy. Simpson's gaze, these images show, fulfills the long-held purpose of social photography-to hold a camera up to people while they put forward the best version of themselves, regardless of where they happen to be."
"Simpson, born in 1942 in Brooklyn, is best known for merging the genres of fashion and social photography. Her new eponymous monograph is now being published as part of Aperture's Vision and Justice Book Series, and in it, Simpson's five decades of work is broadly surveyed, bookmarked by her early adventures in street photography and her later experimentation with collage."
Coreen Simpson, born in 1942 in Brooklyn, merges fashion and social photography across five decades, moving from street photography to collage. Her portraits are nearly always frontal; subjects meet the camera with confident, buoyant gazes whether on the street, in studios, clubs, or homes. Early works include Cooking Is My Game (Lady Chef), Velma Jones (1977), and Church Ladies (Zambia, 1986), which display intimate, expressive presence. The work repeatedly examines the fashioning of self in studio portraits, runway images, and community scenes, emphasizing people presenting their best versions regardless of setting.
Read at ARTnews.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]