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On Friday, WVFC readers in Philadelphia (or willing to travel there) can meet noted boomer photographer Deborah Willis, who will be signing copies of her new book Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs at 5:30 p.m. at the African-American Museum of Philadelphia (7th and Race Streets). Willis, Professor of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, has long been equally famous as a world-class photographer and as curator of other important images of and by African-Americans. Her books include Family History Memory: Recording African-American Life; Reflections in Black: A History of African-American Photography; A Small Nation of People: W. E.B. DuBois; and African American Portraits of Progress.
Willis spoke with WVFC editor Chris Lombardi a few weeks ago about the book; about men, women and photography, and about how something as seemingly ephemeral as a political campaign fits into the greater history she has spent her life lifting to air.
As a photographer, you've been a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Light Works, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Yet your renown comes equally from your work as a national collector and interpreter of African-American photography. What came first?
I began my worked as a photographer and began curating at the same
time, in the late 1970’s. I had to. There was such a lack of African-American images
in the greater world, in exhibition. So the trajectory started at the same moment. It was like the title of that August Wilson play: two
trains running at the same time.
How do you balance the two threads? It’s not planned. I just find the necessity to continue the work. Work to me is just like getting up in the morning.
Most
photographers I know seem ruled by ego. It is true for many of them. Sometimes I
wish I had that kind of sense about self. But I also understand that
often it comes with a lack of commitment to do the kind of honoring of
community that is essential.
Congratulations on the great book. How did it come about? And when did you involve Washington Post reporter Kevin Merida, who writes the overview essay?
As the experience of the campaign transformed over the year and a half, I'd started thinking about the campaign and the images we had seen. So I started collecting ideas and themes that I saw were bring repeated: Tears. Joys. Respect. Curiosity. I wanted to analyze that, and use them in my teaching—I’ve been teaching a class in iconic images. I'm very interested in how icons are created.
I thought it was important to have someone like Kevin Merida, who’s covered six presidential campaigns.
The publisher put us together, but we became fast friends once we started working together.
These days, everyone's snapping campaign photos from their cell phones. Yet I thought at first these were all professional photographs: they're all good.
There’s a mixture of professional photographers, cell phone cameras from people who attended rallies, and student photographers. Everyone felt that they wanted to be part of this moment. Some professional photographers didn't want their work included, and I wanted to make a tribute to their work. But the experience was also that of those other photographers. It was kind of a stop-action moment for all.
And your criteria were focused on the themes you mention? I’m already using the book in my teaching around these themes—to show how people become icons, part of history, simultaneously adored and objects of curiosity. For example, people want to touch icons. Over over in these photos, they reach out to touch his hand. Also: smiles, babies, autograph seekers. And the cellphone cameras sticking up out of the crowd, that becomes another theme image.
As a photo curator I responded to the themes, to the emotive quality of the work, and the individual photographer. I'm always looking at the photo as an object: the background and foreground, what's being chosen.
That image of Obama's 2007 campaign launch, on the steps of the state Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, has
become an icon already. Yet it comes quite late in the book. That image leads Kevin’s essay. It’s the transition moment to Kevin discussing history.
Did you see any difference in the
