Corey Keller – författare

With a powerful juxtaposition of portraiture and landscape photography, this book explores Dawoud Bey’s vivid evocations of race, history, time, and placeDawoud Bey (b. 1953) is an American photographer best known for his large-scale portraits of underrepresented subjects and for his commitment to fostering dialogue about contemporary social and political topics. Bey has also found inspiration in the past, and in two recent series, presented together here for the first time, he addresses African American history explicitly, with renderings both lyrical and immediate. In 2012 Bey created The Birmingham Project, a series of paired portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church, a site of mass civil rights meetings, and the violent aftermath. Night Coming Tenderly, Black is a group of large-scale black-and-white landscapes made in 2017 in Ohio that reimagine sites where the Underground Railroad once operated. The book is introduced by an essay exploring the series’ place within Bey’s wider body of work, as well as their relationships to the past, the present, and each other. Additional essays investigate the works’ evocations of race, history, time, and place, addressing the particularities of and resonances between two series of photographs that powerfully reimagine the past into the present.Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtExhibition Schedule:San Francisco Museum of Modern Art(February 15–October 12, 2020)High Museum of Art, Atlanta(November 7, 2020–March 14, 2021)Whitney Museum of American Art, New York(April 16–October 3, 2021)

Step into the world of Anna Atkins (1799-1871), perhaps the world's first female photographer and a pioneer of the medium. She lived an existence full of heartache and triumph, from her mother's death when Atkins was an infant to her publication of multiple photographic books as an adult. After the passing of her mother, Atkins was raised primarily by her father and grandfather, who placed an emphasis on both her emotional and intellectual growth. As a result, she spent her life surrounded by some of the greatest inventors of Victorian England during the Industrial Revolution.Despite societal gender norms of the era, which typically limited women to a life within the home, Atkins gained the respect of the scientific community with her ambitious multivolume album Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, now recognized as the world's first photographically illustrated book. Her cyanotypes, in addition to their scientific accuracy, added artistic beauty to her publications, setting the stage for new uses of this already experimental technology. In an era replete with state-of-the-art inventions and innovative ideas, Atkins pushed photography forward in its earliest days with courage, creativity, and brilliance.Ages thirteen and up.