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Background information
"This photo volume, 'Deana Lawson' by Peter Eleey & Eva Respini (eds.) is the first scholarly publication on the artist Deana LAWSON, surveying fifteen years of her photography; it accompanies the first comprehensive museum survey exhibition at ICA/Boston, MoMA, as well as at High Museum of Art featuring her artwork. A singular voice in contemporary photography, Deana LAWSON has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of black identities in the African American and African diaspora for over fifteen years.
Content
The photographic work by Deana LAWSON samples numerous photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and found images, creating narratives of family, love, and desire. Her 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, her works channel broader ideas about personal and social histories of black life, love, sexuality, family, and spiritual beliefs. This publication will include selections from the personal family photographs by Deana LAWSON and archive material of vernacular images that have profoundly informed her work. The book 'Deana Lawson' includes also essays by Eva Respini and Peter Eleey (curators of the exhibition), Kimberly Juanita Brown (Professor at Dartmouth College), Tina M. Campt (Professor at Brown University), Alexander Nemerov (Professor at Stanford University), Greg Tate (writer, musician, and producer), and a conversation between the artist and Deborah Willis (Professor at New York University)." (© Mack books, 2021)