S9E9: Deborah Willis

Deborah Willis is an artist, curator, and a professor at New York University. Her most recent book is The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

Willis first took up the question of “Where are the Black photographers?” as a graduate student:

The only images that we saw of Black people were people being beaten, the labored body, which we all know happened. But there were also other Black experiences that were about love and about work and about pride. So when I brought that up in the classroom, I didn’t think that, 40 some odd years later, I’m still doing the same research.

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If you enjoyed this conversation with Deb, you might want to check out Ellen’s and Jessica’s earlier conversation with photojournalist Daniella Zalcman.

This season’s theme music is from Solar Echoes, by Nigel Stanford.

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