Exhibition: Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive
During the twentieth century, nearly every small town in the United States boasted a local studio photographer. These skilled image makers were dedicated to recording the portraits and events of their communities. Much of this vernacular visual culture has been dispersed or destroyed. Kinship & Community takes a look at a rare slice of that history, focusing on the work of Black community photographers working in urban neighborhoods in Dallas and Houston and small towns in East Texas from 1942 to 1984.
Central to the exhibition is the role of the community photographer, one who documents, even shapes, a close-knit place, emphasizing the people and rituals of everyday life. The photographs in Kinship & Community show aspects of everyday life: parties, rodeos, church meetings, parades, political gatherings, and school photos. Although these works span some of the most volatile and consequential years of the Civil Rights Movement, they show collectively the daily experiences of Black life in Texas against the backdrop of segregation.
The photographs in this exhibition are drawn from the Texas African American Photography Archive (TAAP), founded in 1995 by writer and filmmaker Alan Govenar and artist Kaleta Doolin. TAAP is a project of the Dallas-based cultural organization Documentary Arts, a unique repository that preserves over 60,000 photographs by Black small-town Texas photographers, from 1870 to the present, including the archives of more than a dozen individual photography studios.
Kinship & Community was curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood with research assistance from Eva Cilman and Anisa Jackson.
This exhibition is accompanied by the publication Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive, Nicole R. Fleetwood and Brian Wallis, editors (forthcoming from Aperture and Documentary Arts).
IMAGE: Social tea hosted by Josie Washington (standing center in black), Dallas, Texas. ca. 1955. Unknown photographer.
