Content area
Full Text
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...