Vision & Justice and Aperture Launch Landmark Book Series to Present a More Inclusive History of Photography and Representational Justice

New York, April 5, 2024—An unprecedented new publishing initiative launching this fall presents a new history of images, race, and justice in America. The Vision & Justice Book Series, conceived by Vision & Justice founder Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and published by Aperture, is a groundbreaking endeavor designed to address past omissions and contribute to the ongoing work of building a richer, more racially inclusive story of lens-based practices. The series commences with three titles that celebrate a vanguard of image-makers and artistic legacies: Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, the first posthumous collection of writings by cultural historian, curator, and writer Maurice Berger (1956–2020); and two monographs that salute the unheralded, yet foundational work of Doug Harris (b. 1943) and Coreen Simpson (b. 1942).

The series launches in October 2024 with the publication of Race Stories, to be followed by Harris and Simpson’s monographs released starting in 2025. After the October 2024 launch, the ongoing series will continue to present titles that center leading lens-based Black artists and related scholars and writers whose work has been central to understanding the role of images in generating equity and justice in America.

Coedited by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, distinguished author, art historian, and John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University; Leigh Raiford, author, leading scholar of Black visual culture, and professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley; and Deborah Willis, MacArthur award-winning artist, historian, and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, the series extends the work of the award-winning 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine, guest edited by Lewis, which sparked a national conversation on the role of images in constructions of citizenship, race, and justice.

“This book series has been many years, if not decades, in the making, given the recognition merited by the artists and essential voices whose work we’re spotlighting and adding to the canon,” said Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, series coeditor and founder of Vision & Justice. “But now, the work is urgent. It is not enough to show the work of Black artists in galleries and museums. Even for the artists whose work has been exhibited widely, there are still sizable gaps in the scholarship produced on the work of artists of color. It’s an asymmetry that has real consequences for the artist and our construction of history. This series was conceived to address that structural inequity and meet a need for narrative correction. It’s been a privilege to collaborate on this work with such esteemed coeditors and our advisory board, and, more broadly, to continue the work of Vision & Justice to reveal how visual culture is foundational to equity and justice in America.”

“The Vision & Justice series will provoke, challenge, and stimulate conversations for the general reader as well as curators, educators, and photographers,” said Deborah Willis, series coeditor. “From documenting student movements of the civil rights, to reimagining the life of fashion and music of the 1970s and 1980s, the series provides critical moments and interventions in the history of contemporary image-making.”

“We are thrilled to launch this series with Maurice Berger’s incisive and thought-provoking writings on race and photography. Assembled together for the first time, Berger’s Race Stories provide readers with the tools to better understand images both aesthetically and politically,” said Leigh Raiford, series coeditor. “With the subsequent volumes on Coreen Simpson, longtime fashion photographer and chronicler of Black urban subcultures, and prolific civil rights–era photographer Doug Harris, the Vision & Justice series will open the way for new, more robust histories.”

“Aperture’s responsibility in encouraging conversations around social justice and photography is anchored in the work of Dorothea Lange, one of our founders,” said Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture. “We are proud to partner with Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, Deborah Willis, and the distinguished Advisory Board to expand and amplify this commitment, and to doing our part to ensure a more equitable, more just future through these vital publications.”

“Since its publication in 2016, our “Vision & Justice” magazine issue remains an essential resource for understanding the role of art in the ongoing movement for equity and social justice,” said Michael Famighetti, editor in chief, Aperture. “We’ve long been aiming to extend that work through a related book series, so it is truly exciting to see this idea come to fruition now. It’s an honor to collaborate with the series editors to bring this new scholarship and thinking into the field.”

To select and present titles with Aperture, the Vision & Justice Book Series coeditors work in consultation with an Advisory Board of Black artists, creators, and scholars, including photographers Dawoud Bey, Awol Erizku, Tyler Mitchell, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems; writers and authors Jelani Cobb, Teju Cole, Vinson Cunningham, Nicole Fleetwood, and Salamishah Tillet; curators and art world leaders LeRonn Brooks, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Rujeko Hockley, and Antwaun Sargent; and scholars, professors, and historians Courtney R. Baker, Huey Copeland, Cheryl Finley, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael B. Gillespie, and Richard Powell.

ABOUT THE TITLES

RACE STORIES: ESSAYS ON THE POWER OF IMAGES
Publishing October 2024
Race Stories, copublished by Aperture and the New York Times, is the first compilation of award-winning short essays by cultural historian, curator, and writer Maurice Berger. Berger, who died in 2020 during the pandemic from COVID-19, spent much of his career studying and teaching racial literacy, and his essays, books, and exhibitions challenged readers and viewers to reconsider both cultural and personal assumptions and prejudices. Edited by curator and scholar Marvin Heiferman, Berger’s husband, and prefaced by the Vision & Justice editors, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Race Stories explores 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. The book brings together a collection of essays written between 2012 and 2019 that were first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times’s former photojournalism blog, Lens. Through Berger’s incisive essays, which direct attention to the most revealing aspects of images, readers see a bigger picture about race through storytelling. To preorder the book, visit: https://aperture.org/books/coming-soon/

DOUG HARRIS
First-ever monograph for the photographer
Doug Harris (b. 1943) helped to create a new visual vocabulary for the organizing and enfranchisement efforts of the civil rights movement. In 1964, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta, and traveled in the rural South for photographic assignments. He also documented everyday life in Harlem extensively, including the Black Arts Movement, Andrew Young’s first bid for Congress, and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Harlem meeting with Malcolm X. His later work was instrumental in the identification and preservation of sacred Indigenous ceremonial landscapes in his former role as Preservation Officer for Ceremonial Landscapes for the Narragansett Indian Tribe. Showcasing Harris’s photographic work across decades, the Vision & Justice book examines for the first time Harris’s multifaceted career and practice.

COREEN SIMPSON
The first major publication dedicated to the artist since 1992
Coreen Simpson (b. 1942) is a Brooklyn-based, and largely self-taught, photographer whose work explores the intersections of style, beauty, and representation. Throughout the 1980s, she made exquisite portraits of New York’s artistic and nightlife scenes—picturing self-styled club goers at the Roxy, Dapper Dan, and David Hammons, among many others. Her varied practice, which encompasses portraiture, documentary-style imagery, and collage work underscores her unique artistic vision. The Vision & Justice monograph will present a survey of her work, alongside contextual essays by leading writers and historians.

FUNDING
Support for the Vision & Justice Book Series has been generously provided by the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Agnes Gund.

ABOUT THE EDITORS
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the founder of Vision & Justice. Her books and edited volumes include The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (2014), translated into seven languages; Carrie Mae Weems, which won the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize; and “Vision & Justice” by Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Lewis was named one of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellows and in 2019 received the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.” Her forthcoming publications include The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (2024) and Vision & Justice (2025). Lewis’s research has received fellowship and grant support from the Ford Foundation; the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Whiting Foundation; the Lambent Foundation; and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M Phil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and a PhD from Yale University. In 2024, she will receive an honorary degree from Pratt Institute in recognition of her Vision & Justice work. For more information on Lewis, visit: https://sarahelizabethlewis.com/

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley,
where she teaches and researches about race, gender, justice, and visuality. At Berkeley, Raiford is also Co-Director and Co-Principal Investigator with Tianna S. Paschel of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three-year initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black Studies funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011), a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize; Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, co-conceived with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler (2023); coeditor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017); and coeditor with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (2006).

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 & 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. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, the photographic history of slavery and emancipation, and contemporary women photographers. 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. Willis has also served as a consultant to numerous museums, archives, and educational centers. In February 2024, President Biden announced Willis as a nominee to be a Member of the National Council on the Humanities.

ABOUT VISION & JUSTICE
Vision & Justice is a catalytic civic initiative that generates original research, curricula, and programs that reveal the foundational role visual culture plays in generating equity and justice in America. Founded and spearheaded by art and cultural historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the initiative builds awareness of the impact of images in the public realm and their capacity to shape the interwoven fabric of individual identity, community collaboration, and democratic participation. Through institutional collaborations, leadership convenings, and public programs Vision & Justice serves as a partner and resource for civic and cultural leaders in fostering representational literacy and justice. For more information on the initiative, visit: https://visionandjustice.org/

ABOUT APERTURE
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From our base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through our acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society. For more information on Aperture, visit: https://aperture.org/

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