New Online Exhibition At William L. Clements Library, University Of Michigan “Framing Identity”

How we show ourselves to the world matters, and photography gives us (sometimes) the chance to have some control over that presentation. Write a book—get a frontispiece portrait done. Become famous—get a magazine cover. People will make judgments based on what they see.

As Tessa Chrisman writes in Nonprofit Quarterly, police in Ferguson, Missouri began to release photos of Michael Brown, pointing to posture, the positions of his hands, just hours after police shot him to death, to justify their actions. And more recently, there were discussions about Vice President Harris’ magazine cover and how the informal look was not sufficiently respectful of the woman or her office.

The Framing Identity show, curated by Samantha Hill, considers how photographs of Black individuals have been used throughout history. The images are mostly portraits and candid shots by Black photographers from the mid-1800s through the turn of the last century, selected from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography.

From the exhibition website