Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph

Product Description Winner of the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize One of the most intriguing photographers of her generation, Deana Lawson’s subject is black expressive culture and her canvas is the African Diaspora. Over the last ten years, she has created a striking visual language to describe black identities, through figurative portraiture and social documentary accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Lawson works with large-format cameras and models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body―often nude―is central. Throughout her work, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful in black life. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty-five beautifully reproduced photographs and an extensive interview with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa. “Outside a Deana Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.” ― Zadie Smith From the Back Cover One of the most intriguing photographers of her generation, Deana Lawson's subject is black expressive culture and her canvas is the African Diaspora. Over the last ten years, she has created a striking visual language to describe black identities, through figurative portraiture and social documentary accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Lawson works with large-format cameras and models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body-often nude-is central. Throughout her work, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful in black life. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty-five beautifully reproduced photographs and an extensive interview with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa. About the Author Deana Lawson (born in Rochester, New York, 1979) gained international attention with her debut in New Photography 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art. Winner of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship and a former resident at Light Work, Lawson received her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and the 2018 Whitney Biennial. Her photography has been published in magazines including Aperture, BOMB, the New Yorker, and Time. Lawson is currently assistant professor in visual arts at Princeton University. She lives and works in Brooklyn.