Deana Lawson

Deana Lawson, the first scholarly publication on the artist Deana Lawson, surveying fifteen years of her photography, will be published to accompany the first comprehensive museum survey exhibition featuring Lawsons 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. Lawsons 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, Lawsons works channel broader ideas about personal and social histories of black life, love, sexuality, family, and spiritual beliefs. This publication will include selections from Lawsons personal family photographs and archives of vernacular images that have profoundly informed her work.

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

Includes essays by Eva Respini and Peter Eleey (curators ofthe 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).

• Publisher: MACK BOOKS (November 24, 2021)
• Language: English
• Hardcover: 144 pages
• ISBN-10: 1912339986
• ISBN-13: 9781912339983
• Item Weight: 2.6 pounds