Linda Foard Roberts: Lament

For all our sakes, I hope Deborah Roberts continues to stake a claim, through her work, for a more expansive view of Black children.

– Dawoud Bey

Deborah Roberts: 20 Years of Art/Work provides the definitive look at the artist’s practice over the past two decades. With newly commissioned texts and a thorough dive into Roberts’ archive, this monograph offers a comprehensive view of one of today’s most significant artists and social observers. An extensive plate section is accompanied by a personal, heartfelt foreword from Dawoud Bey on “the tragic mischaracterization of Black children”; an insightful essay from Ekow Eshun on the social and political histories of innocence, race, and the fractured nature of the contemporary Black experience; a celebratory tribute from Carolyn Jean Martin on the musicality, humility, and generosity of Roberts’ practice; and a free-ranging conversation between Roberts and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

Since the beginning of her artistic career, otherness has been at the center of Roberts’ consciousness. Her early ideals of race and beauty were shaped by and linked through Renaissance art and fashion magazines— mythical, heroic, beautiful, and powerful images that embodied a particular status not afforded equally to anyone Roberts knew. Influencing the way she viewed herself and other African Americans, those images led her to investigate the way their identities had been imagined and shaped by societal interpretations of beauty. Having one’s identity dismantled, marginalized and regulated to non-human status demanded action. This led Roberts to critically engage image-making in art history and pop-culture, and ultimately grapple with whatever power and authority these images have over the female figure.  

When I photograph, I respond instinctively in the moment to what inspires me. Through the years, I have become more attuned to emotional moments, wrinkles in a face, the nuances of my environment...All of the visual elements resonate more deeply with me emotionally, so do the people I have worked with, including those who are no longer with us.

– Debbie Fleming Caffery, Lenscratch interview

In Light of Everything immortalizes in book form Debbie Fleming Caffery’s first major career retrospective presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Examining the deep emotional relationship between people and place, Caffery is recognized as a leading photographer visualizing the American South. Her shadowy, blurred images thoughtfully feature elements of luster to reveal elements of the shared human experience—childhood, spirituality, labor—and ultimately bring darkness to light. This publication is her most comprehensive to date, showcasing projects produced within and beyond the American South to Mexico, France, and the American West. Caffery’s sixth title, In Light of Everything is the first to feature all series over the course of her career.

With his pictures, he homes in on the historical amnesia that envelops not just the Mexican-American War but so much else of America’s past, effectively enabling our new era of intolerance.

– Simon Romero, New York Times

There is no photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what is now the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, photographer Tomas van Houtryve photographed the region with glass plates and a nineteenth-century wooden camera. Van Houtryve pairs portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. This book challenges dominant Western mythologies and questions the role that photographs (both present and missing) have played in shaping the identity of the West.

This book has four covers, each featuring a different portrait on the front and a landscape on the back. Trade copies are chosen at random; for signed copies, please choose either Bernadette, Dorothy, Gomeo, or Nathan below.

…an elegiac portrait of the artist’s family, infused with an open, tender love seen through flesh, cherished objects, and landscape.

— David Ondrik, photo-eye

Linda Foard Roberts: Passage is a compilation of five series, created over ten years. North Carolina-based photographer Roberts works in enduring genres—landscape, portrait, and still life—and photographs her twenty-first-century surroundings using 4 × 5-, 5 × 7-, and 8 × 10-inch cameras and vintage lenses, some over 100 years old. The result is seemingly eternal, timeless, black-and-white photography that exploits the peculiar ability of the camera to produce images that are both extremely present and yet suspended in time. 

The photographs in this volume, Roberts’ first monograph, are meant to be read like visual lines in a poem, metaphorical and layered, with each photograph bestowing a deeper meaning upon the next.

Limited edition of this book available here.