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Kinship and Community: Highlights from the Texas African American Photography Archive celebrates the rich history of photography created by and for Black communities in Texas.From eighteenth-century ambrotype portraits by unidentified photographers to the work of self-employed photographers serving segregated towns and neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century, a rich body of photography was created by and for Black communities in Texas. The Texas African American Photography Archive (TAAP), founded in 1995 by Alan Govenar and Kaleta Doolin, contains more than sixty thousand negatives and prints from this history.
Kinship and Community distills the archive's remarkable photographs into a moving testament to the medium and its transformative power. Filled with joy and pride, the images in this volume portray exemplary individuals and groups while documenting the parades, church services, graduations, and sporting events that punctuated everyday life. These positive depictions of Black life, by countering the mainstream media's racist stereotypes, played a quiet but powerful role in the struggle for civil rights.
Today, community photography provides a model for collaborative image-making, its vitality stemming from this union of ethics and aesthetics. Many of the photographers featured in
Kinship and Community learned their trade in the military or from other Black photographers. As the civil rights era progressed, their aptitude and artistry enabled them to develop an affirmative vision for African American communities in a deeply segregated state. Decades later, the time has come to celebrate the accomplishments of these talented photographers, who include A. B. Bell, Marion Butts, Rodney Evans, Elnora Frazier, Alonzo Jordan, Benny Joseph, and Eugene Roquemore.
Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.
About the author
Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art, cultural history, aesthetics, photography, and documentary studies. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and she curated an exhibition of the same name for MoMA PS1. She was also the guest editor of Aperture magazine’s Spring 2018 issue “Prison Nation.”Brian Wallis is executive director at Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW), Kingston, New York. He was deputy director and chief curator at the International Center of Photography, New York, from 2000 to 2015. His writing has appeared in Aperture, Artforum, Art in America, Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Village Voice. Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She is the author of On Juneteenth (2021), “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016), and Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002). Her 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in History.Alan Govenar is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, photographer, filmmaker, and director of Documentary Arts, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1985 to advance essential perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of more than thirty books, including Jasper, Texas: The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan (2011) and Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues (2010). Deborah Willis is university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, she has written numerous books on African American photography and culture, including The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (2021), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits (2008), and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000).Rahim Fortune is a photographer from the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. His books include Hardtack (2024) and I can’t stand to see you cry (2021), which was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook of the Year and winner of the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award. He is a nominee for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
