When Deborah Willis arrived as a freshman at the Philadelphia College of Art in the early 1970s, Black photographers seemed to have made a mark in mainstream America. There was the famed photojournalist Gordon Parks, the first African American staff photographer for Life. Moneta Sleet Jr. had won the Pulitzer Prize in feature photography in 1969 for his picture of a stricken Coretta Scott King and her daughter at her husband’s funeral. That same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had featured James Van Der Zee’s romantic portraiture of Harlem, which Willis trekked up to see in New York six times. So she was astonished to discover the total absence of any Black photographers in her college texts. When she queried a professor, she found herself tasked with a semester-long research project that would grow to a decades-long quest to hunt down the works of Black photographers—starting from the invention of the daguerreotype—before they might be lost, and their memories with them.
“That research and archiving became my vision, my focus, making sure there was an afterlife to these photographs that were stored in closets, or drawers, or these storage houses,” recalls Willis, University Professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts.
