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

Celebrating the rich history of photography made by and for Black communities in Texas.

Kinship & Community presents an inspiring example of collective self-representation from the final decades of official segregation in the United States. With more than 150 images of everyday Black life—created by Black photographers for Black communities across Texas—this collection celebrates a proud but overlooked regional culture while testifying to the power of photography as a social tool. These photographers, typically operating small businesses that provided portraiture, promotional images, and event documentation, worked with their communities to develop an enduring vision of hope and uplift. Many also contributed photos to newspapers, magazines, and civil rights organizations, sometimes focusing on political leaders and protests. But their primary subject was the everyday expression of a vibrant and self-sufficient Black culture—an exhilarating achievement in the wider context of entrenched racial oppression. Completing the book is a vivid new photographic essay by Rahim Fortune that takes up the archive’s legacy and places it firmly in the present tense.

Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.

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 (ICP), New York, from 2000 to 2015. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (2020), African American Vernacular Photography (2005), and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). 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 a writer, folklorist, 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 forty books, including Come Round Right (2025), Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues (2010), Untold Glory: African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement (2007), Deep Ellum and Central Track (1998), and Stoney Knows How (1981). 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 Austin, Texas, and 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 was shortlisted for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.