Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present

As a student in the 1970s, Deborah Willis found that images of black beauty did not exist in the larger culture. Determined to redress this imbalance, Willis started a lifelong quest that has become Posing Beauty. Subjects such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker illuminate the past; Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali take us to the civil rights era; Denzel Washington, Lil' Kim and Michelle Obama represent the present. However, Willis does not only celebrate the famous but also recovers a world many never knew existed. Featuring the work of more than one hundred photographers, Posing Beauty challenges our assumptions about what it means to be "beautiful".