When Dr Deborah Willis was an undergrad student at the Philadelphia College of Art, she asked the question that informed her work for years to follow: “Where are all the Black photographers?”
From photos by Gordon Parks in Time magazine to Black image-makers capturing daily life in Ebony and Jet magazines – she knew that Black photographers, like her father, were making their impact on the world. Growing up, her father was an amateur photographer, and her father’s cousin owned a photo studio, and seeing them photograph people as a child created a desire in her to become an image-maker.
At seven years old, she discovered the book The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava; upon seeing its cover image, she had a revolution. “Fast forward, I wanted to be a photographer,” she says.
