Seeing Black: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 and Beyond

Situating historical inquiry alongside contemporary practices of Black image-making in New Orleans, SEEING BLACK: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 and Beyond engages the photographic grammars, textures, multiplicities, and visual sounds of Black life in and outside the city.

SEEING BLACK features over two hundred images by nearly ninety Black photographers whose work embraces the camera’s visual power--discerning, beholding, and documenting people, places, events, collective memories, encounters, and ever-present moments of blackness. From the invisible to the obvious, the mundane to the spectacular, the overlooked to the seen, the erased to the remembered, the artists explore a range of photographic frequencies, styles, and rhythmic scores. SEEING BLACK invites us to explore historical and contemporary archives of Black life while challenging dominant viewing practices, asking who is taking the picture, who is in or missing from the frame, and how to shift our interactions with the visual image through an intentionally embodied Black gaze.

Kalamu ya Salaam (b. 1947, New Orleans) is a writer, activist, social critic, filmmaker, and retired educator. His work is widely anthologized and exists within the Black Arts Movement and its ongoing legacy. Salaam is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Blues Merchant Songs for Blkfolk (1969), What is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994), Be About Beauty, which won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2019, Cosmic Deputy (2021), a fifty-year retrospective of poetry, and Precise Tenderness: 100 Haiku (2023); two collections of essays, including Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement (1998); a collection of prose, In Love and Struggle (2023); and thirteen plays. He is editor and co-editor of six anthologies, including New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader (2018), which was the One Book One New Orleans city-wide read selection for 2020.