africanah.org

Living in the era of the selfie where many millions of people seem to be busy with their self-image, without political or social necessity, but just for fun or vanity or insecurity, in which that can happen effortlessly through the lightning-fast technical developments and in which those images in no time at all spread around the world, it may be difficult to fully appreciate the importance of these staged, historical photographs, photographs that, on top of that, cannot be massively distributed because they were made with cameras that immediately printed them on paper.

In this article Rob Perrée shows how important these historical photographs of black Americans were and still are.

Unknown American maker, Studio-Portrait, 1940s-50s, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Read more »