Deana Lawson
By: edited by Peter Eleey and Eva Respini ; with contributions by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Tina M. Campt, Peter Eleey, Alexander Nemerov, Eva Respini, and Greg Tate, and a conversation between Deana Lawson and Deborah Willis
Publisher: Institute of Contemporary Art; MoMA PS1; MACK
Published: 2021
Place of publication: Boston; Long Island City, NY; [London]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9781912339983
Copyright date: 2021
Subjects: Exhibitions; Interviews; Portrait photography; Black people; Portraits; African Americans; Africans; Artistic Photography; Portraits (Photographie); Noirs; Noirs américains; Africains; Photographie artistique; Art photography
Description: The first scholarly publication on the artist Deana Lawson, surveying fifteen years of her photography, will be published to accompany the first comprehensive museum survey exhibition featuring Lawson's artwork. A singular voice in contemporary photography, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of black identities in the African American and African diaspora for over fifteen years. Her work samples numerous photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and found images, creating narratives of family, love, and desire. Lawson's photographs are made in collaboration with her subjects, who are sometimes nude, embracing, and directly confronting the camera, destabilizing the notion of photography as a passively voyeuristic medium. Whether in posed photographs or assembled collages, Lawson's works channel broader ideas about personal and social histories of black life, love, sexuality, family, and spiritual beliefs. This publication will include selections from Lawson's personal family photographs and archives of vernacular images that have profoundly informed her work.
Notes: Catalog to accompany the exhibition held: ICA/Boston, Massachusetts, November 4, 2021 - February 27, 2022; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY, April 14 - September 5, 2022; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, October 7, 2022 - February 19, 2023.--Page 144.

"Index of works": page 129.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 132-133).