Results by title

115 books match the query 'Portraits' and 4 start with l

cover of Leavin' a Testimony: Portraits from Rural Texas

Leavin' a Testimony

Portraits from Rural Texas

By Patsy Cravens

University of Texas Press, 2006

First settled by Stephen F. Austin's colonists in the early nineteenth century, Colorado County has deep roots in Texas history. Mainly rural and agrarian until late in the twentieth century, Colorado County was a cotton-growing region whose population was about evenly divided between blacks and whites. These life-long neighbors led separate and unequal lives, memories of which still linger today. To preserve those memories, Patsy Cravens began interviewing and photographing the older residents of Colorado County in the 1980s. In this book, she presents photographs and recollections of the last generation, black and white, who grew up in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

The folks in Colorado County have engrossing stories to tell. They recall grinding poverty and rollicking fun in the Great Depression, losing crops and livestock to floods, working for the WPA, romances gone wrong and love gone right, dirty dancing, church and faith, sharecropping, quilting, raising children, racism and bigotry, and even the horrific lynching of two African American teenagers in 1935. The Colorado County residents' stories reveal an amazing resiliency and generosity of spirit, despite the hardships that have filled most of their lives. They also capture a rural way of life that was once common across the South, but is now gone forever.

[more]
cover of Listening to Images

Listening to Images

Tina M. Campt

Duke University Press, 2017

In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.
[more]
cover of Look at me: Photographs from Mexico City by Jed Fielding

Look at me

Photographs from Mexico City by Jed Fielding

Jed Fielding

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image? An in-depth pictorial study of blind schoolchildren in Mexico, Look at me draws attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form.

Combining aspects of his earlier, acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding has concentrated closely on these children’s features and gestures, probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Design, composition, and the play of light and shadow are central elements in these photographs, but the images are much more than formal experiments; they confront disability in a way that affirms life. Fielding’s sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of self-consciousness. In collaborative, joyful participation with the children, he has made pictures that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our creatureliness.

Fielding’s work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. Look at me contains more than sixty arresting images from which we often want to look away, but into which we are nevertheless drawn by their deep humanity and palpable tenderness. This is a monograph of uncommon significance by an important American photographer.

[more]
cover of Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Parents and Their Families

Love Makes a Family

Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Parents and Their Families

Gigi Kaeser

University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

This handsome volume combines interviews and photographs to document the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered parents and their children. It allows all of the family members to speak candidly about their lives, their relationships, and the ways in which they have dealt with the pressures of homophobia. Included in the book are people from a diverse array of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, representing a wide range of family structures. Together, they provide clear evidence that family roles and responsibilities need not be based on gender, and that children thrive in an atmosphere in which understanding, respect, and love transcend the prejudices of the day.

[more]