In this selection from his archive, Dennis Morris gives us a beautifully well-judged and eloquent portrait of the black diaspora, frozen at a particular moment in time. It is pregnant with anticipations of what is still to come, infused with future possibilities. We are invited to read these images backwards and forwards. Growing up black in the 1970s, they suggest, was not so much a state of being as a state of becoming.

— Stuart Hall

Growing Up Black charts not just the history of Black Britain but Britain itself. Published by our friends at Autograph ABP, the renowned photographer Dennis Morris captures intimate moments within the black community, his images recording the frequently contested history of the first generation to call themselves black.

Dennis Morris started his career as a photographer at an early age. He was 11 years old when one of his photographs was printed on the front page of the Daily Mirror. As a young boy in the church choir, he was given a camera which was to spark his lifelong passion for photography. Growing Up Black is a beautifully designed, thought provoking monograph which documents domestic life in 1960s and 70s Hackney, East London, where Morris moved with his family aged 4.

To accompany the black and white photographs and Morris’ own text are four compelling essays by key commentators on black culture – essayist and broadcaster, Professor Stuart Hall; writer and lecturer Kobena Mercer; author, broadcaster and award winning columnist, Gary Younge; and Director of Autograph ABP, Mark Sealy.

Limited to an edition of 500 with a signed silver gelatin print by Dennis Morris, Growing Up Black blurs the boundaries between social commentary and art object and reveals the foundations of Dennis Morris’ photographic journey.

Find more information about the publication here.

Check out this great notice for Laura Heyman’s exhibition Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again in the latest issue of The New Yorker. The Palitz Gallery in New York City, where Don’t Move Again will be on be on view until June 16, is the location for the latest staging of this exhibition, which premiered in the Light Work Main Gallery in September 2010. Click here to read more about the show and to see more images from the project, which captures life in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake. Make sure to stop by the Palitz Gallery, at the Lubin House, before June 16 to see the prints in person if you’re in the area. You can also read about the work in Contact Sheet 158.

Above: Blondine Herard, Polycarpe Racine, Mariot Herard, Daschmine Herard, December 2009

Check out this fantastic video interview of Lola Flash by Nono Osuji. Lola talks about many things, including being honest in your work as an artist, her first camera (a Minox), addressing racism and homophobia in her images, and the latest phase of her ongoing project Epicene.

Lola Flash was a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in 2008. Her work is featured in the Light Work Annual 152 and in the Light Work Collection.

Love the work that Sarah Stolfa and her staff are doing for photography and photographers over at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Known for staging world-class exhibitions in their space, PPAC’s upcoming show is something special. Three long-time Light Work friends, Doug DuBois, Amy Stein, and Mark Steinmetz, will be in a show there which opens March 3. The show, called East of Eden, sounds amazing. The exhibition revisits themes explored in the John Steinbeck novel, including, according to the PPAC, ” . . . themes of the west as a place for transformation and prosperity, familial relationships, America on the brink of change and the deterioration of the small town.”

I recently spoke to Sarah Stolfa, executive director, and Christopher Gianunzio, exhibitions coordinator at PPAC, about their reasons for staging East of Eden now and with these particular three artists:

“There has been a lot of discussion lately about attention span as it relates to both literature and artistic, or more specifically, photographic practice. We had been discussing the tremendous crossover between photography and literature in terms of descriptive power, narrative, and how photographs can function like written language. We wanted to do a show that fused these two mediums.

The Internet has radically changed the way we experience images and writings. We wanted to create an exhibition that reacted against this diminished attention span through photographic projects where time became an important factor in their conceptualization and production. The novel, East of Eden, is so sweeping in its scope, both in terms of time and the length of the book itself, it seemed like the perfect fit. Conceptually, it made sense to take a novel that has been so influential in literature and create an exhibition of contemporary works that embodied many of its central themes.

Doug DuBois’s work about his family, All the Days and Nights, fit perfectly with the concept of the show. Having worked on one project for decades, it has become a record of a family’s complex history. The themes within the work and the scope of the project both relate to Steinbeck’s novel. As does the theme of being stranded or traveling to a better place that Amy Stein uncovers in her work Stranded. Stein, in the aftermath of the failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, states the work “is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as this collapse of certainty left the country stuck in an unfamiliar space between distress and relief.” This loss of faith in the American promise resonates with the novel East of Eden. Mark Steinmetz’s interest in photography is how it can function as literature. The South Central work is not a document of Knoxville, TN, but rather a loose narrative about the deterioration of the small town and the socio economic implications during a shift in technology.

The other unifying link between these three artists, though working within varying aesthetics, is their choice to use the portrait as the delivery system.”

The exhibition open March 3 with a reception March 10 and an artist talk by Mark Steinmetz on March 11. In the meantime, check out Doug DuBois, Amy Stein and Mark Steinmetz‘s work in the Light Work Collection as well as this video of DuBois talking about his work over on Sunday and Wednesday:

Doug Dubois Interview from Georgi Unkovski on Vimeo.

—Mary Goodwin, Associate Director

Image: Amy Stein, Peri, Route 64, Outside Lexington, Kentucky, 2005