"Kinship and Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive shares the rich history of photography made by and for Black communities in Texas"-- Provided by publisher.
Kinship and Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive celebrates the rich history of photography made by and for Black communities in Texas.
Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive presents a remarkable chapter in America’s visual history. By documenting collective self-representation from the last decades of racial segregation—images of Black everyday life created by local Black photographers for Black communities across Texas—this collection celebrates a unique but overlooked regional culture while underscoring photography’s enduring power as a social tool. Kinship & Community rescues and elevates the work of more than a dozen photographers who helped produce this abundant visual culture, including A. B. Bell, Marion Butts, Hiram Dotson, Elnora Frazier, Curtis Humphrey, Alonzo Jordan, and Benny Joseph.
These dedicated local photographers, typically operating as small businesses, recorded the activities and events of their communities: parades, award ceremonies, coronations, and other celebrations of everyday achievements. Many of them also contributed to national and regional publications, primarily Texas’s numerous Black newspapers. While those contributions did include some coverage of civil-rights leaders and picket lines, their main emphasis was on the quotidian accomplishments of a vibrant and self-sufficient Black culture—accomplishments all the more remarkable for a wider context of entrenched racial and political oppression. As Nicole R. Fleetwood writes in her essay, “The TAAP collection demonstrates what happens when we shift our attention away from the exceptional moments of Black American life most often highlighted in the national media, slow down, and pay attention to the local and regional scenes where Black people build livelihoods, neighborhoods, and intergenerational networks of belonging.”
Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art, cultural history, aesthetics, photography, and documentary studies. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and she curated an exhibition of the same name for MoMA PS1. She was also the guest editor of Aperture magazines Spring 2018 issue Prison Nation.
Brian Wallis is executive director at Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), Kingston, New York. He was deputy director and chief curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, from 2000 to 2015. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (2020), African American Vernacular Photography (2005), and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003).
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of On Juneteenth (2021), Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016), and Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002). Her 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Alan Govenar is a writer, folklorist, poet, playwright, photographer, filmmaker, and director of Documentary Arts, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1985 to advance essential perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of more than forty books, including Come Round Right (2025), Lightnin Hopkins: His Life and Blues (2010), Untold Glory: African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement (2007), Deep Ellum and Central Track (1998), and Stoney Knows How (1981).
Deborah Willis is university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, she has written numerous books on African American photography and culture, including The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (2021), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits (2008), and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000).
Rahim Fortune is a photographer from Austin, Texas, and the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. His books include Hardtack (2024) and I cant stand to see you cry (2021), which was nominated for the Paris PhotoAperture Photobook of the Year and winner of the Rencontres dArles Louis Roederer Discovery Award. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
