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

Kinship and Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive celebrates the rich history of photography made by and for Black communities in Texas.

Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive presents a remarkable chapter in America’s visual history. By documenting collective self-representation from the last decades of racial segregation—images of Black everyday life created by local Black photographers for Black communities across Texas—this collection celebrates a unique but overlooked regional culture while underscoring photography’s enduring power as a social tool. Kinship & Community rescues and elevates the work of more than a dozen photographers who helped produce this abundant visual culture, including A. B. Bell, Marion Butts, Hiram Dotson, Elnora Frazier, Curtis Humphrey, Alonzo Jordan, and Benny Joseph.

These dedicated local photographers, typically operating as small businesses, recorded the activities and events of their communities: parades, award ceremonies, coronations, and other celebrations of everyday achievements. Many of them also contributed to national and regional publications, primarily Texas’s numerous Black newspapers. While those contributions did include some coverage of civil-rights leaders and picket lines, their main emphasis was on the quotidian accomplishments of a vibrant and self-sufficient Black culture—accomplishments all the more remarkable for a wider context of entrenched racial and political oppression. As Nicole R. Fleetwood writes in her essay, “The TAAP collection demonstrates what happens when we shift our attention away from the exceptional moments of Black American life most often highlighted in the national media, slow down, and pay attention to the local and regional scenes where Black people build livelihoods, neighborhoods, and intergenerational networks of belonging.”

Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.