"You might already recognize the figures in Coreen Simpson's photographs. Yes, they are influential and famous: Winnie Mandela, Eartha Kitt, and Toni Morrison, to name a few. But some of her other images - her studio portraits and street candids - are familiar in a different way. Simpson's lens captures them with such intimacy that they might call to mind your neighbors, childhood pastor, or play cousins."
"Her career archives decades of Black culture, imparting equal esteem to churchwomen adorned in their Sunday best and high-fashion runways or glitzy premieres. "Every aspect of her electrifying practice is a celebration of Black self-fashioning," write Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the editors of a new book honoring Simpson's career since the 1970s. Released on October 14, Coreen Simpson: A Monograph is the second edition in Aperture's Vision & Justice series."
Coreen Simpson's photographs document decades of Black cultural life with equal attention to celebrities and everyday people. Her studio portraits and street candids render subjects with intimate, familiar presence, connecting figures to neighbors, church congregants, and family. The images honor Black self-fashioning across contexts from Sunday-best church attire to high-fashion runways and glitzy premieres, often incorporating surrealist visual strategies. Simpson also created the Black Cameo, an afrocentric reworking of the cameo motif that appeared widely on celebrities and everyday women after commercial licensing. The cameo's success helped advance her photographic practice by funding equipment and expanding visibility.
Read at Hyperallergic
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