Donna Gustafson – författare

Generously illustrated with photographs from early twentieth century reformers to contemporary artists, this collection of essays re-examines the genre of social documentary photography through the shifting lens of photographic objectivity, modes of dissemination, and the passions animating documentary projects.While the public’s acceptance of photographs as visual evidence made documentary photography possible, canny interventions employed by image makers and their editors alternately exploit and dismantle assumptions of the medium’s transparency, testing our wish to see pictures inspire social change.Among the photographers included in the exhibition and book are Berenice Abbott, Max Alpert, William Castellana, Walker Evans, Larry Fink, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, Boris Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Igor Moukhin, Gordon Parks, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur Rothstein, Sebastião Salgado, Arkady Shaikhet, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Weegee et al.

Inspired bya private archive and including contemporary work by artists who acknowledge the continued relevance of Angela Davis’s experience and politics, the essays, interviews, and images in this book provide a compelling and layered narrative of her journey through the junctures of race, gender, economic and political policy.Beginning with the arrest, trial, and acquittal of Davis, 1970-72, and continuing through her world tour to thank those who joined in demanding her release and her influential career as a public intellectual, the book examines fifty years of history in light of the current political moment. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive (press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis’s political writings), the book includes an interview with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected these materials, as well as essays that ouch on visibililty and invisibility, history, memory, and the iconography of black radical feminism.