The Power of Images: A Conversation about Race Stories

Please join Aperture and the Photography Program at Parsons School of Design at the New School for a panel discussion about Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, by Maurice Berger and edited by Marvin Heiferman (Aperture; New York Times, 2024). Joining Marvin Heiferman are Drs. Sarah E. Lewis and Deborah Willis, creators of the Vision & Justice Book Series and coeditors of this title.

Race Stories is the first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. The book examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combating racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling.

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Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images

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Marvin Heiferman is a curator, writer, editor, and producer. He organizes exhibitions and online projects about photography and visual culture for venues that have included the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, International Center of Photography, in New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and LIGHT Gallery, New York. His publications include Photography Changes Everything (Aperture; Smithsonian, 2012) and Seeing Science (Aperture; University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 2019). Heiferman has contributed essays and articles to numerous artist monographs, museum catalogs, trade publications, magazines, and media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, Artforum, Gagosian Quarterly, Design Observer, Aperture, Art in America, and BOMB. He has edited Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, by Maurice Berger (Aperture; New York Times, 2024), and Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, (Aperture, 1986).

Dr. Sarah E. Lewis is an art and cultural historian and founder of Vision & Justice. She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University, where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening, and coeditor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture, beginning with Race Stories (Aperture; New York Times, 2024). The “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine, guest edited by Lewis, received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. 

Dr. Deborah Willis is a curator, photographer, and a leading scholar of photography and Black studies. She is university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where she is also the director of the NYU Institute for African American Affairs and the Center for Black Visual Culture. She is a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow. Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her coauthored book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (with Barbara Krauthamer) and in 2015 for the documentary Through a Lens Darkly, inspired by her book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present. In February 2024, President Biden announced Willis as a nominee to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities.

Maurice Berger (born and died in New York, 1956–2020) was a cultural historian, curator, and writer, who spent much of his career studying and teaching racial literacy through innovative visual literacy projects. In influential essays, books, and provocative museum exhibitions, Berger gathered and presented compelling photographic images to engage and challenge readers and viewers into reconsidering both cultural and personal assumptions and prejudices. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (2000) and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2010), which was also one of the premier projects mounted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. He received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and was nominated for an Emmy Award. 

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Image: Deborah Willis, Carrie in EuroSalon, Eaton, Florida, 2004; from Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images (Aperture, 2024); Courtesy the artist