When Dr Deborah Willis was an undergrad student at the Philadelphia College of Art she asked the question that informed her work for years to follow: “Where are all the Black photographers?”

From photos by Gordon Parks in Time Magazine to Black image-makers capturing daily life in Ebony and Jet magazines – she knew that Black photographers, like her father, were making their impact on the world. Growing up, her father was an amateur photographer, and her father’s cousin owned a photo studio, and seeing them photograph people as a child created a desire in her to become an image-maker.

At seven years old,she discovered the book The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava; upon seeing its cover image,she had a revolution. “Fast forward, I wanted to be a photographer,” she says.

Ultimately, her passion for photography would result in pioneering research for her in-depth undergrad paper, which included around three hundred names and works by black photographers. Publisher Richard Newman would recognize the importance of her findings, and together in 2000 they would create reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers: 1840 to the Present – the first comprehensive history of black photographers.

Their book reshaped the narrative of America through showcasing to the nation images that centered the point of view and life of the everyday Black person in the moments in which they were facing discrimination and subjected to subhuman treatment.

A Century of Vision: Black Photographers and the Evolution of Portrayal

black image-makers in the 1950s to 1960s, such as Doug Harris, Elaine Tomlin, and Bobo Fletcher, began to study photography in workshops, art schools, and community centers. “Many of these photographers were steadfast to awaken social consciousness,” Willis notes in the first edition of Reflections in Black. “Their work is a testimony to the depth of understanding and love these photographers have for humanity.”

From the 1980s to the 1990s, work by photographers such as coreen Simpson began to be viewed as fine art, combining graphic abstraction and conceptual photography. Many of these images were “informed by their families and explored how they dealt with social issues like racism, unemployment, and child and sexual abuse”, Willis writes. Photographers ask their viewers to “contextualize his or her own experience within the visual referents offered by the photographer, and in doing so to find her or his own historical perspective, interpretation, or meaning in these works”, Willis writes.

Currently, she is intrigued by photographers who are asking difficult questions about their personal and family lives while creating abstract photographs and using colors to photograph their environment. “Photographers are documenting, but they’re also making and asking questions about the future,” she says. “At the same time, they’re finding ways to celebrate the lives that have been lived and using new technologies to make three-dimensional images, making them monumental.”