"In the expansion of this book, Willis considered the effects of migration and the importance of images for people forced to leave home. "The aspect of migration is a central way of me reading these images, today there are so many people who are from the diaspora that are photographers now," she said. "When families had to leave home, with disaster today, what do you take with you now? Photographs are what people are taking.""
"Willis was studying at the Philadelphia College of Art (the college merged with another institution to become the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1985. UArts closed its doors in 2024) when she asked a professor why Black photographers were missing from the history books. "Where are the Black photographers?" she recalled. That question morphed into the monumental project that became Reflections in Blac"
Deborah Willis dedicated decades to uncovering, cataloging and exhibiting Black photographers and images of Black people. A MacArthur "Genius Award" recipient, she produced Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present, now released in a new edition with 130 additional images and a gallery show. The expanded work foregrounds migration and the significance of photographs for people forced to leave home. Willis grew up in North Philadelphia where her mother's beauty shop housed the "Black color wheel of magazines" and her father practiced amateur photography. Reflections in Black began as an undergraduate project after she asked, "Where are the Black photographers?" She teaches and leads the photo department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Read at www.npr.org
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