Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive

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.