Join us for a 3-part lecture series on Thursday evenings in February on African Diaspora Photography with California College of the Arts Professsor Makeda Best

Discussions will introduce audiences to key African American photographers, photographers of the African diaspora, and their work. Though thematically organized, these will be active discussions in which the attendees will be encouraged to discuss and respond to works presented throughout the core lecture presentation. A short bibliography will be available for interested attendees for further reading and exploration.

Students will gain both an understanding of the history of African American photography and photography of the African diaspora, and a general introduction to the history of photography.

WEEK 3 | Text and Image Addressing the work of twentieth and twenty-first century practitioners, this lecture will discuss how artists have combined texts and photographic images to explore identities, histories, and social realities of the lives of people of the African diaspora. Through direct sensorial interaction with the viewer/readers, and the addition and evocation of unseen real and imagined voices, text and image works have the capacity to engage viewers/readers in new ways. Topics to be discussed include African American photographic books by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and more contemporary work by Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Hank Willis Thomas.

Makeda Best is a historian of photography and an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts. She earned her PhD from Harvard University; she also studied studio photography at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where she earned an MFA. She is featured in Oregon Public Radio and Annenberg Learner’s Essential Lens – Analyzing Photographs Across the Curriculum (2015).

Purchase tickets here

Image: Dawoud Bey, A Young Man in a Bandana and Swimming Trunks, Rochester, New York, 1989; gelatin silver print; 24 x 19 1/2 in. (60.96 x 49.53 cm); collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Dawoud Bey