Updated November 23, 2025 at 1:31 PM CST
For decades, Deborah Willis has dedicated her career to unearthing, cataloging and showcasing Black photographers and photographs of Black people. The MacArthur "Genius Award" winner is the author of a spectacular collection of books including the seminal Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present.
Twenty-five years after its publication, a new edition of Reflections in Black is out with 130 new images and a gallery show inspired by the book. In the expansion of this book, Willis considered the effects of migration and the importance of images for people forced to leave home.
"The aspect of migration is a central way of me reading these images, today there are so many people who are from the diaspora that are photographers now," she said. "When families had to leave home, with disaster today, what do you take with you now? Photographs are what people are taking."
Morning Edition's Michel Martin visited Willis at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she teaches and leads the photo department.
Here are four takeaways from their conversation.
1. Willis' upbringing shaped her love for photography
Willis grew up in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where her mother had a beauty shop and kept what Willis calls: "the Black color wheel of magazines."
The publications included Ebony, Jet, and Tan and featured images that influenced her growing up. Her father, a policeman and tailor, was also an amateur photographer.
2. Reflections in Black started as an undergrad paper
Willis was studying at the Philadelphia College of Art (the college merged with another institution to become the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1985. UArts closed its doors in 2024) when she asked a professor why Black photographers were missing from the history books.
"Where are the Black photographers?" she recalled. That question morphed into the monumental project that became Reflections in Black. She began her research by reading city directories.
"Because of segregation in the 19th century, I was able to identify with the asterisk the colored photographers … I created this list of 500," she said.
She took that list to the Schomburg Center in Harlem, where she found some of the photographers' images and created portfolios for each one. Later, with the help of Richard Newman, her "publishing angel," the paper she wrote as an undergraduate grew into a book.
3. Frederick Douglass understood photography as biography
Frederick Douglass was one of the most photographed people during the 19th century. The writer and abolitionist is known to have had about 160 photographs and portraits made of him.
"I believe in reading his words that photography was biography," Willis said. "We've not found a photograph of him smiling." She emphasized Douglass himself collaborated with the photographer behind the lens in part as an effort to counter degrading images of Black people.
4. Willis searched for "The Exhibit of American Negroes," which W.E.B. Du Bois organized for the 1900 Paris Exposition
Wills first heard about the exhibit in the 1970s, when she went to the Library of Congress looking for photographs from it. She said staff told her the photographs didn't exist.
Twenty years later, photographs from the exhibit were retrieved by a young Black man working in the archives. "They didn't exist because they weren't processed," Willis told NPR.
Du Bois, she said, understood the importance of photography and often asked, "Why aren't there more Black photographers, Black men studying photography?"
The digital version of this interview was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi and Danielle Scruggs.
Copyright 2025 NPR
