Deborah F Willis

In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in ...

A stunning, visual biography of Michelle Obama that finally puts her phenomenal fame into a cultural and historical context we can all understand.There has never been a First Lady like her before. While there have been a slew of Obama celebrity books, none contain the message of Deborah Willis and E...

“The emotional range and depth of these stories, their clarity and deftness, is astonishing.” —Alice Munro A finalist for the Governor General’s Awards, Vanishing and Other Stories is the stunning debut short story collection from Deborah Willis. Evocative and passionately written, Vanishing brillia...

As a young South African woman of about twenty, Saartjie Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot Venus," was brought to London and placed on exhibit in 1810. Clad in the Victorian equivalent of a body stocking, and paraded through the streets and on stage in a cage she became a human spectacle in London ...

A celebration of African-American culture, vividly captured in more than 500 stunning photographs. Black, A Celebration of a Culture, presents the vibrant panorama of 20th-century black culture in America and around the world in more than 500 photographs from the turn of the last century to the pres...

Winner of the International Center for Photography's 1995 Award for Writing on Photography, Picturing Us brings together a diverse group of African American writers, scholars, and filmmakers in the first concerted effort to analyze and respond to the photographic images of blacks through history. Th...

This stunning collection of photographic portraits traces US history through the lives of well-known abolitionists, artists, scientists, writers, statesman, entertainers, and sports figures. Drawing on the photographic collections of the National Portrait Gallery, author Deborah Willis explores how ...

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we approach its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian...