Items related to Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s...
“A monumental contribution to contemporary American culture. . . . Willis has forever changed the conversation about beauty in American life.”―The New York Times
With more than two hundred arresting images, Posing Beauty recovers a world many never knew existed. Historical subjects such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker illuminate the past; Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali take us to the civil rights era; Denzel Washington, Lil' Kim, and Michelle Obama celebrate the present. Featuring the work of more than one hundred photographers, including Carl Van Vechten, Eve Arnold, Lee Friedlander, and Carrie Mae Weems, Willis's book captures not only the lives of the famous but also the barber shop, the bodybuilding contest, and prom night. African American beauty finally gets its due in this landmark work from one of our most distinguished historians. 242 duotone photographs; 40 pages five-color photographs"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Deborah Willis, a MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Fletcher Fellow, is the author of Reflections in Black, Posing Beauty, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, and the New York Times bestseller Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs. She is chair of the photography department and a University Professor at New York University.
From Publishers Weekly:
Willis (Reflections in Black), a MacArthur fellow and chair of New York University's photography department, curates a collection of iconic portraits and snapshots by anonymous photographers in a history of beauty that merges gender, race, family, class. Willis's words, a distillation of her inquiries into beauty and race, are few—the images speak for themselves. The photographs, organized thematically, reach back to the 1890s and forward to the current first family. Famous photographers share perspective with family photographers and those known only as Unidentified Photographer. The recognizably famous—James Baldwin, Marian Anderson, Joe Louis—appear along with those known only as Mom and Friend, Two women holding magazine, ca. 1950s or Barber cutting man's hair outdoors, ca. 1930s. Willis's content is groundbreaking; rarely, for example, are men this adequately represented in a work devoted to beauty within black culture. For Willis, this extraordinary compilation is the culmination of my exploration of beauty within black culture and through the medium of photography. For readers, this is a dazzling eye-opener. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 0393340597
- ISBN 13 9780393340594
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages280
- Rating
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