MEDITATIONS
Deborah Willis
Willis has made photographs throughout her life that explore the same themes she investigates in her scholarship, but with a particular focus on femininity, beauty, and love. Her ongoing project Went Looking for Beauty: Refashioning Self includes both intimate images of garments from her friends’ closets and “Street Views,” in which she documents gloriously dressed people on the street, often in Harlem. She wrote, “Throughout the history of art and image-making, beauty as an aesthetic impulse has been simultaneously idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and identity has become increasingly complex within contemporary art and popular culture. My work challenges the relationship between beauty and desire by examining the representation of fashion and reinvention.”
About the Artist
Deborah Willis
No bio copy in Word doc. Copy below is pulled from PDF.
As an artist, author, and curator, Deborah Willis's art and pioneering research has focused on cultural histories envisioning the black body, women, and gender. She is a celebrated photographer, acclaimed historian of photography, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, and University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored 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.