Deana Lawson

Faux leather bound hardback with printed tip in and embossed text
24 x 29cm, 144 pages

Deana Lawson, the first scholarly publication on the artist Deana Lawson, surveys fifteen years of her photography and is 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 includes selections from Lawson’s personal family photographs and archives of vernacular images that have profoundly informed her work.

Accompanies exhibitions at ICA/Boston from 3 November 2021 – 27 February 2022; MoMA PS1 from 14 April – 5 September 2022; and High Museum of Art from 7 October 2022 – 19 February 2023.

Includes 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).