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

Aperture is pleased to announce plans for a new publishing initiative, the Vision & Justice Book Series, which will extend the work of the award-winning 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine, reexamining and redressing historical narratives of photography, race, and justice. Titles will be announced in the coming months.

This Vision & Justice Book Series will be deliberately corrective, addressing past omissions and contributing to the ongoing work of telling a richer, more racially inclusive story of photography. It will foreground leading Black photographers, as well as written contributions from a range of scholars, writers, and curators. Each volume will present essential voices, who were not necessarily recognized in their time or during the early stages of their careers but whose work, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has had immense impact on the history of the medium and on modern and contemporary visual culture at large. A critical addition to Aperture’s book program, this project reinforces not only the institution’s commitment to reassessing its own publishing history, but also the urgent need for self-examination in the field as a whole.

The Vision & Justice Book Series takes the prescient thinking of Frederick Douglass and his post–Civil War speech “Pictures & Progress” as a starting point. It wrestles with the urgent question of how, in a democracy, the foundational right of representation (and the right to be recognized justly) has historically—and is still—tied to the work of visual representation in the public realm. How have narratives created by culture—the arts, performance, and images—both limited and liberated our definitions of national belonging in this digital democratic age? How can an examination of our visual literacy be vital for society’s collective consciousness and self-comprehension?

The series, which has received lead support from the Ford Foundation, and for which Aperture continues to fundraise, will be coedited by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, distinguished author, art historian, and guest editor of the 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine; Leigh Raiford, author, leading scholar of Black visual culture, and professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley; and Deborah Willis, artist, historian, and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

To support the Vision & Justice Book Series, please contact the development team (development@aperture.org).

Support

For press inquiries, please contact Giada De Agostinis (gdeagostinis@aperture.org).