Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits

New York City

:There is increasing recognition that photography provides one of the best means to track the history, settings, culture and people who have contributed to America's story. From Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner's graphic images of the carnage of the Civil War to views of presidential inaugurations to photographs of men on the moon and portraits of influential figures, the unblinking camera has provided visual documentation of who were are, what we have done and where we are heading.

Photographic portraits offer particularly interesting insights into the personalities — famous, infamous and unknown — who have shaped the country Americans know today. This is especially true with regard to African Americans, an underchronicled element in US society.

American history is retold through photographic likenesses of black Americans in "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits," a collaborative exhibition project of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and the International Center of Photography (ICP). It is on view at the ICP through September 9.

The NMAAHC, the 19th and newest member of the Smithsonian Institution, is slated to open within a decade on Washington's National Mall adjacent to the Washington Monument. This inaugural exhibition is curated by Deborah Willis, chair of the department of photography and imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and author of numerous books, including a history of black photographers.

The show features 100 photographs from the NPG's permanent collection that trace 150 years of US history through likenesses of African American statesmen, slaves, abolitionists, artists, writers, scientists, entertainers and sports figures. Starting with portraits from the mid-Nineteenth Century, the exhibition examines the manner in which sitters often collaborated with photographers to create positive images and challenge demeaning stereotypes. In the process, they refuted predominately negative representations of blacks in American mainstream culture.

"As we examined the photographs that compose this exhibition," says NMAAHC director Lonnie G. Bunch III, "it was clear that they revealed, reflected and illuminated the variety of creative and courageous ways that African Americans resisted, accommodated, redefined and struggled in an America that needed but rarely embraced and accepted its black citizens."

Inevitably, a good many of the older images were taken by unknown photographers. More recent portraits are by such name photographers as Berenice Abbott, Bruce Davidson, Phillippe Halsman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Arnold Newman, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Carl Van Vechten, James VanDerZee, Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand. As Willis writes in the catalog, "Many photographers used composition and studio setups to establish spaces where African Americans could express themselves visually, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally."