Edited by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis

Aperture and Vision & Justice announce an unprecedented new publishing initiative that 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 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.

The Vision & Justice book series commences with three titles that celebrate a vanguard of image-makers and artistic legacies: Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, a compilation of writings by the cultural historian, curator, and writer Maurice Berger (1956–2020), to be published in fall 2024; and two monographs that salute the unheralded, yet foundational work of Doug Harris (b. 1943) and Coreen Simpson (b. 1942), to be published starting in 2025.

The series is 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.

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.

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

Additional fundraising is underway.

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For press inquiries, contact publicity@aperture.org.

Read more about Vision & Justice in the New York Times, “Welcoming Underexposed Black Photographers Into the Canon”