Long before she became chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Deborah Willis’s father gifted her a camera to document vacations, holidays, and family reunions. “I was seven years old,” the Philadelphia native reminisces. “My dad always loved photography. His cousin had a photo studio and his best friend was a photojournalist at a Black newspaper.” Willis grew up thumbing through issues of Ebony, Jet, LIFE, and National Geographic in her mother’s beauty shop and pouring over photography books including The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCavara. After years of wishfully passing its Romanesque steps on her way to a junior college around the corner, 22-year-old Willis enrolled in the Philadelphia College of Art.
“I had a difficult professor who said I was taking up a good man’s place,” she reveals. “‘All you're going to do,’ he said pointing to me in a classroom of 18 men and 3 women, ‘is get married and get pregnant.’ But that silenced me in a way that pushed me forward.” With encouragement from photography history professor Anne Tucker, Willis began researching Black photographers who were missing from her textbooks. In tracing their contributions to American photography from 1840 to 1940, Willis set the tone for her prolific career. A historian, curator, and recipient of countless awards and honors, she is also the author of 28 photography books that share Black photographic history outside of prevailing stereotypes.
“I remember what it meant to be shut down in the classroom,” she says, “So I want my classes to be a circle of encouragement.” Each semester, Willis reiterates the power of storytelling, encouraging students to translate their lives through photographic work. “Growing up, I used to sit in the hall and listen to the stories that the women told in my mom’s beauty shop,” she recalls. “They were the best storytellers. It was therapy for them. There’s something cathartic about visually articulating your story.”
Professor Willis’s Dream Syllabus
“I am fascinated with this series of Carrie Mae Weems images. The essays really enhance and bring nuance to the photographs. The kitchen table holds so much significance. It’s a place where many of us share meals, moments of joy, and difficult conversations with our families. I love that she’s used this setting to heal. Carrie's work is so central for me because it's about recovering and discovering at the same time. In the series, there’s an image of a little girl practicing her lipstick. It reminded me of my Aunt Theresa who taught me how to put on lipstick. She always wore red lipstick and dressed to the nines even though she worked in a factory every day. I love that Carrie gives us a way to recover those memories through quiet stories of women who are, in a sense, warriors.”
“‘Fish Heads’ is an original poem written and performed by Daniel J. Watts in the iconic Louis Armstrong kitchen based on an interview clip from the Armstrong Archives. As I was researching Louis Armstrong—I’m a big fan—I looked into his wife, who bought their now famous Queens home without him knowing. She wanted him to be comfortable when he returned home from his tours. She had a huge kitchen with double oven stoves which was really unusual. You'd see that in Hollywood, but not in New York, let alone in a Black home.
I really relate to the line, ‘jazz was made in a black woman's kitchen.’ The woman in this poem is trying to protect the little boy as he goes across the street to find an ingredient—which many of us did growing up—but then getting creative with what she has and making music out of that.”
“This book started with love letters. I'm really corny and always looking for a love story. I wanted to share Black love stories through the struggle for emancipation. I remember going to historic sites like Gettysburg and hearing Civil War stories, and realizing that the stories of Black soldiers and their families had gone unacknowledged. I started going through the National Archives and found letters that touched my heart. In one, a woman wrote to her husband, not knowing if he would receive her letter. She said, ‘I'm sending these buttons to you in hopes that when you place them in your shirt, you'll remember me and your children.”
“I recall hearing that W.E.B Du Bois organized an exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition called ‘A Small Nation of People.’ I went to the Library of Congress in 1975 looking for images from the exhibition and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t have any.’ 25 years later, a curatorial assistant there found 400 photographs and other materials hidden away at the bottom of a forgotten box. This time period is just 30 years after the end of slavery. This film by Joanne Burke looks at similarly overlooked contributions of Black American expats. From Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet to Lois Mailou Jones and Langston Hughes.”
“The author is a young historian, a star writer, who’s found a way to introduce fashion as scholarship. She interweaves stories about fashion and empowerment, Black beauty and rights, migration and naming. I love that she talks about parents’ dashikis and Afros and how the way they dressed informed her about politics of the time. She also delves into how we adapted African dress to find our identity. It’s a rich, exciting, humorous book that focuses on family love, girlhood, the Black arts movement, and the closet.
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