An Oral History with Deborah Willis by Kalia Brooks - BOMB Magazine

Speaking with her niece, the photographer traces the origins of her practice through anecdotes about her childhood, early career, and the influence of photographers like Roy DeCarava, Jack Franklin, and her father, Thomas Meredith Willis.

As a photographer, curator, author, and educator, Deborah Willis uses images of everyday Black life to reframe and expand mainstream ideas about American history and culture. Instead of accepting liminal, binary representations of American experiences, Willis attends to both joy and pain in a more balanced process of capturing and curating photography. During this oral history interview with Kalia Brooks, curator, writer, and Willis’s niece, the familial pair explore the origin of Willis’s balancing act through anecdotes about her upbringing in Philadelphia and the influence of photographers like Roy DeCarava, Jack Franklin, and her father, Thomas Meredith Willis. Brooks posits that the intimacy in Willis’s practice is integral and imbues closeness with the viewers. Having had the privilege to eavesdrop on their conversation, I recognize that this intimacy goes beyond the practice of photography and methodical approach to curation. It is also evident in the way Willis divulges the stories of her life and journey, and her mentoring as University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

— Janée A Moses, Director of the Oral History Project

Kalia BrooksGood morning, Dr. Deborah Willis. How are you?

Deborah WillisGood morning, Dr. Kalia Brooks. I'm really great and I’m happy to be speaking with you.

KBLikewise! I’d like to take this opportunity in your oral history to focus on your artistic practice and teaching. Some people don't know that your work, as an artist and as a professor, are intertwined, the way in which you work brings these entities together and makes it holistic and comprehensive.

But let’s start at the beginning: Dr. Deb, as you are affectionately known, would you tell me about your first experience with photography? What’s your earliest memory of it?

Deborah Willis. Self Portrait in Mirror, Harlem Renaissance, 2015. Vogue Magazine, January 16, 2019.

DWMy first memories of photography are from my childhood, growing up in North Philadelphia in the ’50s and ’60s. My dad did interior decorating, which was then called paperhanging, and then he was a policeman and later owned a grocery store. He was also seriously interested in photography. He had a camera and would pose my sister, Yvonne Brooks, and me—we were eighteen months apart—for different occasions throughout the year, like Christmas, Easter, and family events. He really had an affection for photography. His cousin Alphonso Willis had a photography studio two blocks away from our house, and his friend, Mr. Jack T. Franklin, was a photojournalist.

So, photography was central. Big cameras, small cameras. My father gave me a Kodak Brownie when I was six years old. I’d wait for him to develop the negatives so that we could place them in the family album. I recognized at an early age that, for me, photography was storytelling.

KBIt’s important to note that as you are my aunt, when you talk about your father, you’re also talking about my grandfather, Thomas Meredith Willis.

DWYes. It is special to have this conversation with you because of that family connection.

KBI wanted to foreground that because my other aunt, Leslie Willis Lowry, who was an archivist at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University Library, sent us a photograph of grandpop from his high school yearbook, where he wrote a caption about his passion for photography.

DWI knew the high school Daddy attended because as a child, we used to drive by Northeast High School in North Philadelphia on Lehigh Avenue. The family home was about thirty blocks west of the school. When Leslie shared the photograph, I was surprised to see his yearbook and the note about his passion for photography and love for travel. Daddy, or T-Dub as we called him behind his back, had this sense, early on, about photography. The yearbook also showed that he was evidently very friendly. Northeast High School was a mixed-race high school in 1941** *with Black and white students. It was essential for me to learn how important my father’s life had been to so many people. And I’m following in his dream footsteps. He attended every exhibition that I curated or participated in during his lifetime. One of the exhibitions I curated, *Men of Bronze, was held at the 369th Regiment Armory in Harlem. I included his military portraits in which he was dressed in uniform and fatigues. He attended the exhibitions I curated at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, my first book signing for An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, 1940–1988, and all my book events. He was there when I graduated from Philadelphia College of Art.

Thomas Meredith Willis, my father and your grandfather, grew up in Orange County, Virginia. We often traveled back and forth to Virginia, and he’d always make photographs of his family members. He loved to travel. I’ve been described as an observer because I’m constantly looking at the road, just like my father. He loved to visit Toronto, Montreal, New York, and New Jersey. I remember seeing photographs of him and my mother, Ruth Ellen Willis, who was a hairstylist, in Atlantic City. They were posed in photographs with her sisters and his brothers on the segregated Black beach, which was called Chicken Bone Beach. In the photographs, he’s shirtless and wearing a swimsuit. It gave me a whole new sense of masculinity and manhood. There were always photographs in our home. We had framed photographs of family members, group images, and portraits. We also had the famed Last Supper oil painting on black velvet. I always think about art in Black homes with the Christ figure alongside images of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. After those two were assassinated, we hung their photos on the wall with portraits of the grandchildren, my grandmother, and other family members.

KBIt's incredible how just a couple of words in a yearbook sparked this muscle memory for you.

DWYeah, I like that. (laughter)

KBWhen I think about the work that we do as a family, as artists, educators, archivists, and curators, and how it’s so deeply rooted in images and our ability to be citizens of the world, I reflect on how special it is to be able to see when that seed was planted and how it continues to grow through the generations.

When did you know that you wanted to be a photographer? Did growing up with all this visual information and seeing the activity of photography as a part of your everyday life spark the idea to pursue photography?

DWI knew when I was a kid. I was fascinated with the camera. The first photograph I made was of my doll. It was Christmas, and we had Black and white dolls. My doll was named Suzie. She was tall, porcelain, stiff, and with bangs. I photographed her under the tree, and in chairs. I would often pose my dolls and make photographs of them for my father and my sister, your mother Yvonne.

KBWhat was the experience of seeing the picture of the image that you took like?

DWWell, the anticipation was really amazing because we had to wait a week for the drugstore to send the images back. (laughter) My father would drop it off at a drugstore, like Woolworth’s Five-and-Dime store. I used to get so excited when Daddy would bring the images in for us to place them in the albums. I was so excited about seeing them.

One day when I was seven, I went to the library and picked up Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life. I was struck by the cover image, and then I started turning the pages. It’s a black-and-white book that had images that were similar to those of my own family and lifestyle. It just excited me. I couldn’t read the text, but I believed that I was looking at my own family in a published book. The bare light bulbs and the dancing, hugs, and kisses. Those depictions of intimate moments stayed with me. I kept the book out longer than I was supposed to, but we eventually had to take it back to the library. I believe my interest in photography started with that book. I didn’t know I could pursue a profession as a photographer, but I knew I wanted to be a photographer. Photography wasn’t encouraged as a potential profession for us kids. But I used to look at Mr. Jack Franklin’s photographs in the Black newspapers, like The Philadelphia Tribune, and Life, Jet, and Ebony magazines. I used to look at the photographs of the women and the men and the families. These were visual moments that I wanted to preserve.

Once I moved on from photographing my dolls, I photographed my Aunt Isabel’s bridge club. My family loved playing cards, and they loved board games. Your mother played a lot. I did not like playing cards. I guess I’m not a competitive person. I would stand around and make photographs of my uncles and my cousins playing pinochle, bridge, and spades. I still have some of the photographs.

Willis Family Playing Cards, 1958. Left to right, seated: Uncle Elmer, Uncle Richard, Uncle James, Daddy, Uncle Cecil; standing: Uncle Jackie, Winifred, Yvonne. Photo by Hank Willis. Courtesy of the artist.

KBI can see that influential element in your practice as an artist. When you mentioned that The Sweet Flypaper of Life felt familiar, like you were looking at images of your family in 1955, that struck me as the baseline for your work. Everything that you’ve done, whether they’re photographs of people or architecture, landscapes, or objects, has that trace of relatability of you as the image-maker connecting with the anticipated viewer. When that image connects with the viewer, the viewer thinks that they know you. It’s a real high level of intimacy, and it’s integral to your practice.

DWWow. It’s fascinating to hear you say that because I’m looking at it in a different way as the image-maker, but you’re reflecting on how a viewer sees the image.

KBEven the way that you deal with or reimagine history is part of your practice. You connect history to memory and imbue this closeness with the viewer. You have this unique ability to take things that may seem distant and connect them with aspects of the self so that people can see themselves reflected in a broader history or landscape or architecture. There’s a way in which you are always connecting larger sensibilities and larger narratives to the individual. I can see The Sweet Flypaper of Life as the source material for your methodology as an image-maker, and also the way that you apply language to your practice and use ordinary objects we all have access to.

DWOrdinary objects that are still treasured. That period in the mid-twentieth century when Sweet Flypaper was published was a moment to capture Black joy and hardship in images. I recall looking at* Jet* and seeing the horrific experiences and horrific deaths. I think about Emmett Till and how his image stayed in my young mind. He was a teenager, and I was an adolescent seeing how his body was brutalized. When I think about joy and pain and the experience of photography, I just remember how important it was for me to keep Sweet Flypaper in my consciousness when I decided to go to art school, which was much later in life than I would have liked. I would have loved to have gone earlier. I attended Peirce Junior College straight out of high school and took academic classes at Temple University. I needed to build a photo portfolio before I could apply to Philadelphia College of Art. I also recognized that my photography wasn’t necessarily about any artistic story. I was looking for a narrative of representation of what we experienced and how we played. We very rarely document play. We used to play hopscotch and double Dutch. Your mom and our cousin Melvina were really good at double dutch. I used to be afraid of the jump rope hitting me, so I was more of the observer; and I loved taking photographs of these moments of play.

Deborah Willis, Daddy’s Ties, 1990–92. Courtesy of the artist.

KBYes.

DWYou know, we went to Sunday school every Sunday and then we had church service and after we had Fellowship hour** **which was at six o'clock, so we were in church all day. Our family attended North Penn Baptist Church at 2419 N. 27th Street in Philadelphia. Before we attended church, my father would take photographs of us standing in front of our homes, decked out in our church clothes, like crinoline skirts and dresses, and hats, with our cousins and neighbors. Mary Schmidt Campbell, art historian and former president of Spelman College, is married to George Campbell, a theoretical physicist and former president of Cooper Union, and he was our neighbor. He was always decked out with a hat. He’s a few years older than me; he’s actually the same age as your mother. After we rediscovered the photographs, I happened to see Mary Schmidt Campbell, and I shared the photographs with her and Goerge. He was so excited to have those family images in their own family collection. I think that story expresses the significance of finding images of photography: It's about sharing.

KBI think sharing is an element too in that intimacy that you create. Sharing is a part of how that connectivity is established. You generate that. What kind of camera were you using?

DWI still had the Brownie.** **My father had a Rolleiflex, and he was very serious about his camera. When our family would go to Atlantic City, my father would carry his Rolleiflex everywhere.

KBMmhmm.

DWOne day, he just happened to walk away, and he told Mom to hold on to the camera. I remember that there was a pinball machine. The image of it is so vivid in my mind. Mom put the camera down on top of the pinball machine because she was watching someone play the pinball machine, and someone swiped the camera. Someone took the camera.

KBOh.

DWOh, my father just blew up. He was so upset. It just destroyed our trip. Mommy still felt bad about it because it was really painful for my father to lose that camera.

KBWow.

DWHe basically stopped taking photographs after losing that camera.

KBWow. It was a real loss.

DWYeah, it was a real loss. I was a teenager then.

KBEarlier you mentioned that you started art school later than you would have liked. You've spoken about your art school experience in other interviews, but I want to center this around your maturation as an artist in that environment. Can you talk about your mentality then? What were you thinking about as you entered into that space? And then, after transitioning, who were you when you came out on the other side?

Deborah Willis, Big Shoes, 2019. The Closest Project/Newark. Courtesy of the artist’s website.

DWI followed your mother and went to West Philadelphia High School, which was on the other side of town. I went to Roosevelt Junior High school in Germantown, so going to high school on the west side meant that I was always traveling on the subways or on the trolleys. My older sister, your mom, decided to go to West Philly so I followed her when it was time two years later. My younger sister, Leslie, took art classes on Saturdays at Fleisher Art Memorial and my dad would drive.** **We would pass Broad and Pine, which was where Philadelphia College of Art was located. It’s this very stately building with Greek columns and marble steps. Whenever I’d walk or drive by, I’d say, "I want to go to that school one day." But my dad had plans for me to go to a junior college. My other sister, your mother, went to Howard University.

I wanted to go to art school, and my father wanted me to study business so that I could learn how to type, get a job at City Hall, and have a secure job as a secretary. He wanted me to work for Goldie Watson who was this mythical Black woman. She was the only Black woman in Mayor James Tate’s administration at City Hall. I obliged my father and went to Peirce College after high school. Back then, it was called Peirce Business School. I was there for two years. It was directly across the street from the Philadelphia College of Art.

Deborah Willis, Bodybuilder #20, 1998, chromogenic print, 20 × 24 inches. Studio Museum in Harlem. Gift of the artist.

KBOh.

DWWe had to wear a uniform: White gloves, white shirt, and black skirt. The uniform reflected our professional goals, secretary and businesswoman. We had to wear our hair a certain way. But because Philadelphia College of Art was across the street, we had to walk past these wonderful steps where the students were wearing blue jeans, overalls, with paint dripping from their T-shirts. As I looked at these students, I thought, I want to be there.

I was also really interested in basketball. I followed college ball, especially Villanova and St. Josephs, and I loved going to basketball games. I’d had a car since I was sixteen, so I would drive to basketball games at Peirce College. It would be late at night when the games ended, and I’d see the students still working in the art school across the street. I was determined that after I graduated from Peirce, I was going to get a job at Temple University, strengthen my SAT scores, develop a portfolio, and get into art school.

Deborah Willis, Ms. Nandi’s House with her husband, 2021, North Philadelphia, PA. Courtesy of the artist.

KBMmhmm.

DWSo I worked at the Temple University Center for Community Studies. The person in charge of the center was Linda Clark. She was very, very fashionable. She hired me and about ten men who were community activists. We traveled to different parts of the country, specifically Huntington, West Virginia. I also had a dream to become a Peace Corps volunteer. VISTA volunteers were being trained in Huntington. I’d travel with the staff, teaching the people in the community how to become grassroots community organizations, to create businesses, and to raise money for government assistance in West Virginia.** **All the while, I was making photographs when we traveled there. By this time, I was twenty and ready to put together my portfolio. I looked at photography in magazines for inspiration. I was always looking at photography magazines, dreaming about becoming a photographer.

KBI want to discuss Deborah Willis as a burgeoning artist. Can you talk about the flavor of things that were peppering your sense of yourself during the late 1960s and 1970s?

DWThat time was wonderful. Moving to New York City from Philadelphia was a dream that I’d had since I was a preteen. In the summer of 1968, I looked for schools in New York in which to study photography so that I could create a portfolio to apply to the Philadelphia College of Art. I read photography magazines often and found an ad to study photography at the Germain School of Photography in Popular Photography magazine. My family was supportive, and my dad assisted me and my cousin, Melvina Smith, in the move to New York. In New York City, I found opportunities to work and think about what it meant to be an artist of photography and what I wanted to do with photography. I decided to study at the Germain School of Photography, which was in Manhattan at 225 Broadway. I took classes in portraiture, medical photography, landscape photography, and a range of classes in color photography. I was always interested in different fields, but I realized I was not going to be a medical photographer because I just couldn’t deal with blood and pain and death. I took more portraiture and landscape classes and after a year, I created a portfolio. I applied to Moore College of Art and Design and Philadelphia College of Art. Both accepted me.

Moore was a women’s college then, and the women seemed more interested in marrying doctors at Hahnemann Hospital nearby. They’d say, “We’re not here to get a BFA or an MFA. We’re here to get an MRS.” I thought, What is that? Then I realized. They wanted to be wives. (laughter) But I wanted to be an artist. So, since I was also accepted to my dream school, I went to Philadelphia College of Art. I studied with Ray Metzker, who was the most amazing photographer. I was twenty-two and starting as an undergraduate, whereas most of the students were eighteen and nineteen years old. I remember my first week there. A faculty member said to me that I was taking up a good man’s space.

KBWow!

DWThis was in 1972. There were eighteen men in the classroom, and he said, “All you’re going to do is get pregnant and get married. A good man could have been in this seat.” I’d spent my lifetime wanting to be a photographer, and he was trying to deny me my dream. Motherhood was not a goal for me at that time. This faculty member was shaming me in front of eighteen men who were from around the world—I was one of only two Black women in the class. I immersed myself in my work, ignoring the mean guy. I focused on getting my work done, photographing women down on South Street and in North Philadelphia. I had another teacher, Anne Wilkes Tucker, who taught art history and photo history. She was just fantastic to work with. I also had Ree Morton, who was a sculptor and painter.

KBListening to you speak about the people who propelled you, whether they were positive or negative, makes me think about you as an educator. Within your art practice, you have made a commitment to nurturing and fostering future generations of artists. I wonder if that commitment to education comes from your own experience of knowing both the charms and the challenges of following your dream.

Deborah Willis, *Nancy Lewis Body Builder, *1999. Courtesy of the artist.

DWMentoring is a big part of my practice both as an artist and as a University Professor and chair. Mentees that I’ve worked and shared a love of photography with include Adama Delphine Fawundu, Carla J. Williams, and Bridget R. Cooks. I believe I started mentoring younger photographers when I taught classes and encouraged the students to make photographs. I taught summer camp in the 1970s and met some amazing young people. It evolved later into what I now understand as the concept of mentoring, which I didn’t identify then. Students often reached out to me to help them find work and other opportunities, but I didn’t think of myself as a mentor.

Although I wouldn’t have used the word mentor at the time, I had teachers who shaped my interests. Anne Tucker had just completed a book on women photographers called The Woman’s Eye while I was her student at Philadelphia College of Art. I noticed that there were no Black photographers in the history books that we were looking at, and I was questioning myself. In 1969, when I was studying photography here in New York City at Germain School of Photography, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I saw this show, Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968. I was surprised that none of the photographers I viewed in that exhibition were in the history books. It was a controversial exhibition, and many Black artists protested the show because it didn’t focus on art by Black artists. I crossed the picket line, and I saw James Van Der Zee’s photographs. I saw Gordon Parks’s photographs. I saw these huge images in the Met. I’d been looking at Gordon Parks’s photographs in Life magazine, and so I was questioning why they weren’t in history books.

Anne Tucker said to me, “Well, why not use this as an opportunity to create a term paper?” And she gave me a list of Black photographers in New York City, which she had from her involvement with Joe Crawford’s The Black Photographers Annual. That list included Danny Dawson, Anthony Barboza, Chester Higgins, Lou Draper, who basically said, “I’m gonna guide you about people to reach out to as you develop your book,” and, of course, Joe Crawford, the publisher of the Annual. Having that access was an amazing experience. I started to reach out to Black photographers on my own. I created a list and wrote letters to Gordon Parks and Moneta Sleet Jr., Morgan and Marvin Smith, and Roy DeCarava. Then I wrote to historical societies and libraries about researching photographers from the nineteenth century. Barbara Blondeau was the chair of the photography department at Philadelphia College of Art and Design then. She was amazing and encouraged me, along with Anne Tucker. Ray Metzker taught me to understand foreground, middle ground, background, and abstraction. I was of two minds of working at that time: Studying the history and creating photographs.

Deborah Willis, *Reflections Civil War Generations, *2018, 24 × 28 × 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

KBWhen you were doing this research, and actively corresponding with photographers, you were essentially developing a community for yourself. What did that do for you when you brought these people together and started talking to them?

DWOh, it was fascinating because I had no idea that Gordon Parks, or anyone, would respond. (laughter) Gordon and I agreed to meet. I was worried about what to wear because—

KB—he’s pretty famous!

DWI was going with my Afro to visit Gordon Parks! Moneta Sleet said to come visit. I met Ming Smith and Lou Draper. Chester Higgins opened up his door to me. I formed this new community and, around this time, I met my future husband, Hank Thomas, who was studying physics at Temple.

KBIn the 1967 and 1968, when you were working at Temple and aspiring to get into art school and just getting your artistic life off the ground, it seems like your personal and professional lives were merging.

DWAround this time, I also spent time with my cousin, Melvina Lathan, whose husband was Bill Lathan, and he was very active in the New Lafayette Theatre. I photographed a lot of the people during that time, but I became ill and had to go back home to Philly. I was just probably not eating right and not getting the rest that I needed because I was trying to do too many things. I moved back to Philly and lived with my mom and dad. They couldn't figure out what I had. They thought I had mono and they gave me all these tests. I couldn't imagine what was wrong with me, but I was losing weight and had high fever. From December to March—three months—I was bedridden.

My Aunt Annie, my mother's aunt, would make a poultice—carrots, onions, garlic, and potatoes—everyday and tie it to my feet. This was to try to draw the fever out. I’d never heard of this medicinal remedy. Eventually the fever stopped, and I went back to Temple. In April of 1970, I decided to find work at Temple and take academic courses at night. By now, I had a position working with the Resident Advisory Board with Rose Wylie. She was an activist for women's rights, including welfare rights and housing. I was the receptionist secretary at her downtown office on Broad and Cherry. I can't believe I'm remembering all this. I left the position after my acceptance at the Philadelphia College of Art and used the portfolio I created at Germain to apply. This was in the fall of 1972. I stopped working at the Resident Advisory Board in the summer of ’72.

While working with the Neighborhood Youth Corps at Temple with Rose Wylie, I met my future husband, Hank Thomas, who was also a Temple student, Physics major. He was five years older than me and going back to school after spending about five years playing jazz in Europe. He lived in France and Germany and Sweden, Iceland, and Finland. He decided he wanted to go back to school to either be a medical doctor or a physicist. He just happened to walk into the office one day after Rose Wylie said that she wanted community activists to be a part of the program, and he was the new person starting.

Around this time, there were protests of the Vietnam War happening outside City Hall, which was like a block away. It was really hard to get around in the city, but Hank arrived, ready to work. When he walked in, he was holding a saxophone in his hand, and he wore these very striking glasses, a beret, an ascot, a dashiki, combat boots, and jeans. So, I'm like, Who is this, and where are you coming from with an ascot and a dashiki? (laughter) He said he was there to work and that his name was Hank Thomas. He was assigned to work in Tasker Homes in South Philadelphia.

Deborah Willis, *Reflections—Gordon Parks’ “American Gothic,” *2018, 24 × 28 × 2 inches.

KBMmhmm.

DWHe was originally from South Carolina. He was also involved with the Black Panther Party. All of these big social things were going on at the same time, like the Vietnam War and the Black Panther Party. Philly was actively engaged with community activists, and a number of people were coming to town to attend different kinds of rallies. I remember hearing Dick Gregory and other speakers like Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez at the Church of the Advocate, which was just a wonderful nondenominational church that everyone in politics, especially leftist politics about Black culture, were speaking at. Everyone was coming to Philly. That place was like a magnet.

The first day I met Hank, he said that he knew the areas he was going to work in South Philly, and there was a Duende festival he planned to develop. The idea was to have an African-centered festival with dance, culture, food, fashion, and just moments to relate to people in Philly. Later that day, Hank asked if he could drive me home, and I said, "Sure," and so he drove me home. We had an instant connection. It was really sweet and nice. He drove a Volkswagen Bug convertible. He’d had it shipped to Philly from Germany. The car was really cute and had these foreign tags. You know, it had a little style to it. We’d chat and get to know each other in that car. I told him about my interest in photography, and when I saw him the next day, he started telling me about his interest in setting up a medical clinic in North Philadelphia for the Black Panther Party. Through him, I started taking photographs and meeting different people that were in the Party.** **I was still developing my portfolio for my Philadelphia College of Art dream. And then my other dream was to go to Africa, to Ghana.

When 1970 rolled in, and I was feeling better,* *I decided to go to Ghana. Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized with Roy Innis and others—I can't recall all their names—to create a Back to Africa study group. I didn’t know everyone in the group, so it was like I went by myself. I paused my classes as they were six to eight weeks a session, so I had time to make this trip.

Deborah Willis, Easter Sunday in Harlem, 2018. Pictured: Hank Thomas, Sr., Hank Willis Thomas, and Rujeko Hockley. Photo by Deborah Willis. Courtesy of the artist.

KBDid you go there as a photographer?

DWI went as a photographer. I wanted to take photographs. I was probably like one hundred pounds then because I had lost so much weight. I remember that we left in August.

KBDid everyone in that group come with a particular role to play? Like, you were there with your camera, documenting, and the others were—

DWYeah. There were other photographers. There were writers. There were activists. They were all amazing people.

KBMmhmm.

DWMost of the people in the group were at least five to ten years older than I was so they had been political activists for a very long time.** **Some of them were thirty years older than me. I met professional baseball player Reginald Jackson on the plane to Accra, Ghana. After paying for the trip, I only had $60.

The opportunity to go on this trip came by way of a flyer. I responded to it and sent my deposit. I had saved money, and it was wonderful to think about going to Africa. My father was very excited about it, and he offered to help me. He was excited for me, but he was also worried. The MOVE organization was developing in Philly at that time, so there was a lot of cultural and political moments going on.

Our flight to Accra was on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. I remember that because some of the people in our group said, "Yeah, the Dutch colonized us, and now we're flying back." When we arrived in Accra, it was hot and beautiful and amazing. They took us around to different places, including where W. E. B. Du Bois had lived. They were developing the W. E. B. Dubois Memorial Center.

Another reason that I was excited to be in Ghana is because my Aunt Isabel was married to Eugene Raymond, who was a student at Lincoln University and his roommate was Kwame Nkrumah, the former president of Ghana.

KBMmhmm.

DWOur Aunt Isabel was very active in cultural movements, and she had a number of Liberian friends who were dancers, singers, and artists. When I was younger, I’d see them at Aunt Isabel’s house and I’d listen to them talk. I was a close listener, and I was especially interested in the energy of artists and their excitement. When I first arrived in Ghana, I just wanted to know more about what happened to Kwame Nkrumah. He was exiled after a coup in 1966, and it was shocking. Nkrumah was a hero to me, and I felt like I knew him because my uncle Eugene was his roommate. That and Aunt Isabel had albums of their photographs, and she cut out articles about him and his successful efforts to decolonize Ghana. The first thing I wanted to do was talk about Nkrumah. The was the wrong thing to do. (laughter) It was a different party and people.

KBAh.

Deborah Willis, Blackamoor images in Florence, Italy, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

DWThey said, "Oh, we don't talk about Nkrumah.” I remember meeting a couple called the Lees. They had become expats and lived in a place called Labone in Accra. That's where NYU's campus is in Ghana.

KBOh wow.

DWThey gave us a great welcome with parties. For six weeks, people invited us all around and to different parties. Can you imagine going to Ghana for six weeks with $60?

KBRight.

DWHank and I weren’t married, but he said that he would send me money through Western Union so that I could make photographs and buy film. I brought a lot of film with me, but I planned to need more. I was also worried about processing.

KBYeah.

Deborah Willis, After Madonna: Cheryl and Noura, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

DWWe stayed on the campus of the University of Accra. I went to libraries, and I started making photographs on the campus. So, it was really wonderful for me, but then other people decided they were going to go to Togo and other countries in West Africa, like Nigeria. They started leaving, and then the woman I shared a room with became seriously ill and she had to leave the dorms. Meanwhile, Diane Dawson, a teacher and one of the young women on the trip, and everybody was going to Togo and Dahomey and every place. And me, being Ruth's daughter, I felt responsible for taking care of my roommate even though I didn’t know her. We moved out the dorms and stayed with a family.

Since the dorms were five dollars per night, I tried to pay the host family. They said we didn’t have to pay them any money, and they just wanted to make sure that my roommate got better. So, I stayed with this host family—he was an American; she was Ghanaian. They were wonderful. I had to go to the market to shop while my roommate stayed in the house. There were cold showers. There were moments that I was not prepared for because I was a person who liked comfort. (laughter) I never realized where our meat came from. Every day, they went to the chicken farm and killed a chicken. I wasn't prepared for that. This sounds corny and naïve, but when they sent me to the market to buy liver, I had never realized liver was an organ.

KBYeah. (laughter)

Deborah Willis, Eatonville, Florida storm tower, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

DWI was twenty-one years old and saying, "No, that's not liver. It shakes.” I thought, We're not going to get that. I can't get that. And they said, "No, this is liver.” They teased me about it for the entire time I was there. I've never eaten liver since then.

Then, Newsweek had photographs of Black men in Philadelphia, pants down, who had been stripped, and arrested after police commissioner Frank Rizzo led a raid of the Black Panther Party’s headquarters. These were Black Panther Party members, and their butts were across the cover of an international magazine. These stripped Black men.

It was horrific. Of course, I'm looking—not gawking—because I'm seeing these shapes, and I'm thinking, Could this be Hank Thomas? Could this butt be Hank Thomas’s? It was so dangerous, and I saw the police with their guns, and I was so freaked out. I couldn't get in touch with Hank, and I called my family. To call home, I had to go to Western Union. I also hadn't received any money, so I was worried about how I was going to survive. My dad was a policeman, and he was concerned as well, but he also told me that Hank was not in the lineup of all of the men who were unfortunately stripped and arrested on the street. But for two weeks, I worried. So, here's the effect of photography on me as a photographer looking at a photograph that dehumanize these Black men.

KBYeah.

Deborah Willis, Reflections Civil War Shadow of a Wedding (Civil War soldier and wife), 2018, 24 × 28 × 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

DWTo cope during those last few weeks, I just did what the other people who were close to me were doing. They were older than me and they guided me. We took a train and a lorry up to Kumasi. I had a chance to travel on these buggies and trucks and I made photographs of it.

When I returned home, everybody was safe, and Hank was fine. Unfortunately, people were still in shock because of this horrific time. We were still working at the Resident Advisory Board. I continued to make photographs. I was trying to figure out what stories I wanted to tell. I knew I wanted to photograph women. I wanted to photograph cultural movements and activists, and not portraits, but street scenes and how people dressed. So, I made all of the photographs, and then I applied, with my new portfolio from the Germain School of Photography and my journalistic photographs from West Africa, and I got into Philadelphia College of Art in 1972. The dream that I had wanted since '65 when I was in high school.

I graduated with my BFA in photography and shortly after, I was pregnant. I couldn’t be excited about it because that undergraduate professor made me feel like my reproductive situation would block my desire to be an artist and that a “good man” could have been in my position. It was all complicated in my mind, and I was really having a hard time. But I thought, Why am I letting this man block me from my dream of being a photographer and also being a mother? So, I continued to make photographs: I made self-portraits of my pregnant belly and portraits of different people over time.

Three months after Hank Willis Thomas was born in 1976, I decided to go to graduate school at Pratt Institute in New York City. During that time, I also taught photography at the High School of Fashion Industries, as well as in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. This was during the mid to late ’70s. I was going to different places in Greenwich Village and learning about Black Women Artists’ Where We At, and attending Women’s Caucus for Art. I was having interracial, gendered, and ungendered experiences with all kinds of artists—men and women. I had a chance to work with Charles Biasiny-Rivera, who was developing the journal Nueva Luz, and Sophie Rivera. I met so many artists who were part of the developing movements, like the Young Lords and the Black Panther Party, Kwame Brathwaite, and the Black Arts Movement, all the important people and moments of this time. This was the world that I was immersing myself in.

Deborah Willis, Mom's Bible, 2019, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the artist.

After graduation, I walked down a corridor at Pratt and saw a flyer for a job at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I was already doing research at the Schomburg at that time, looking for Black photographers. The job was for a photo specialist. It was great to even have the opportunity to interview at the Schomburg. I met Jean Blackwell Hutson, Ruth Ann Stewart, and Ernest Kaiser. They were librarians and archivists who’d been there for years. I was hired. I was in this dream archive, and I could work on collections I was interested in. Two months later, Richard Newman, who was an editor for Garland Publishing, contacted me to ask if I’d like to do a book on Black photographers. I said I had an undergraduate paper, in undergraduate language, that I could send him. He read it and said, “Oh, you have a book!”

I started going to the library, sitting on the floor, reading all the Black newspapers, all the colored city directories, everything I could to find Black publications that had photographs. I researched books from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. By then, I had three hundred names. I was still going to museums in New York City, trying to figure out how to put this project together. I was still culturally aware of what was going on in the Black community and also working with making images. I created portfolios of the photographers so that they could be identified as photographers and not just by the street scene or the famous person that they photographed. I wanted these Black photographers to have an identity.

One day, I received a letter from Carrie Mae Weems. I didn’t know her yet. She was putting together an exhibition on women photographers, and she invited me through this letter. It was the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles. And I, of course, said, "Yes." And it's amazing how this happened because we didn’t have internet or anything like that, so we were contacting each other through mail and telephone.

Deborah Willis, Shotgun House, Green, Orangeburg, South Carolina, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.

KBYes. And she reached out to you through the art school, or at your residence in Philadelphia?

DWWe’re still trying to figure out how we found each other. I wasn’t affiliated with an art school in 1981. I believe she sent the letter to my home in Philadelphia, where I was living at the time.

KBAnd she invited you to be in an exhibition?

DWYes. An exhibition on women photographers.

KBDo you remember which work you selected for that show?

DWYeah. I included photographs of women in South Philly, “Women on the Scene.”

KBWas that your first exhibition opportunity?

DWNo, because I was showing at other small places in the Philadelphia area. I showed at the Y, right outside of Philly, and street fairs in New Hope, Pennsylvania. This was 1981. My earliest show was at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. FESTAC was also happening at that time and I wanted to go to FESTAC, but I didn't because my sisters, your mom, wanted to go to Kenya.

KBAh, okay. Was FESTAC happening in Senegal?

DWLagos, Nigeria.

KBNigeria.

Deborah Willis, *Hortense’s Red Dress, *2013, Florence, Italy. Courtesy of the artist.

DWYeah, and of course, I didn't go, but there was an exhibition in ‘77 at the University Museum in Philadelphia and it was called FESTAC. They invited people who had gone to Africa and made photographs. That was the beginning. Before that, there were smaller shows that gave me an opportunity to show my work. After graduating from Philadelphia College of Art and making images and, as I mentioned before, this professor trying to malign me after I had gotten pregnant with Hank, I continued to make photographs. Because Hank Senior was from South Carolina, and I was always fascinated with the Gullah people of South Carolina and we traveled often to Florence and Beaufort, to the Sea Islands and Saint Helena, I’d stop and make photographs. I was also interested in going to Mobile, Alabama. I still recall driving there. We also drove a lot to New Orleans. I love New Orleans. I’d been going to New Orleans since the early '70s for the music festivals down there. And as a musician, Hank Senior was interested. So, we often had summer road trips and I’d make photographs. I photographed a lot of houses. And that’s probably why I don’t like B&Bs now because I did so many. Only they weren't called B&Bs then. They were called “guest houses” and you had to use a communal bathroom. I still visually remember seeing a condom coin-vending machine in the bathroom. (laughter) I was like, Why is this in there? It was real creepy, and I wish I had made a photograph of it, but it was just so scary for me.

Deborah Willis, Faith in name and ‘faith’ in ink, 2019, digital inkjet print, North Philadelphia. Courtesy of the artist.

KBYeah.

DWWe drove often between 1970 and 1979, both before and after we had Hank Jr. The hardest thing for me was driving through Mississippi because of the stories I’d heard and read about. We drove through Mississippi in the Bug. I’d always slide down in my seat until we got through a certain town because it was just really frightening. We didn't drive at night.** **We just did a lot of day-driving and staying in guest houses.

KBMmhmm.

DWBut New Orleans was the place that we wanted to go to. I wanted to photograph the cemeteries, and I wanted to learn from Marie Laveau. I wanted to know more about her story and that history. So, from the women stories that I was following at home, I created that same experience in other places. I've met a number of photographers who were making photographs down there then. Some I didn't get to know 'til later. I wanted to photograph the land in New Orleans and in South Carolina, the Gullah and Saint Helena. I didn't photograph a lot in North Carolina and I didn't travel a lot in Florida. I was only in northern Florida, in Jacksonville and American Beach. I was interested in coastal areas. And because of that, I found some interest in looking at Civil War stories, and monuments or remnants of stories about the history of the South.

KBListening to you tell the story of the road trips brings to my mind contemporary bodies of work that I've seen of yours, like the photographs of the shotgun houses. I think those are from Louisiana.

DWYes. Some are from Louisiana and some South Carolina. I loved the architecture and the intimacy that I imagined in these family homes.

KBThis is an exciting and expansive community. When did you know you were going to compile the book, An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography of Black Photographers, 1940–1988? And also, the work that you did in Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston’s birthplace, photographing the landscape, which was a big character in that body of work. The relationship between the landscape and the domestic setting, including houses of worship or beauty shops, places where people gather. Can you talk about how you were making those connections as you moved through a particular place, selecting what you're going to photograph. Then looking back on everything that you've made from a particular trip, how did you start to develop a body of work to tell the story of you being there and documenting a place?

DWI read a lot of Zora Neale Hurston in ’70s. And Alice Walker. Their book, I Love Myself When I am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive is a collection of Hurston’s work, edited by Walker. Hurston was an important influence for me. I thought I wanted to be an anthropologist, or a visual anthropologist, based on Hurston’s descriptions. With that in mind, I was thinking, I want to make photographs about women and women's work. The story of women and work had a lot to do with growing up in my mother’s beauty shop and documenting that. I wanted to preserve those stories, and other stories in different communities that were often overlooked. That's what I wanted to document. And cooking and other foodways. I was fascinated. We lost a lot of family members in the ’70s, so I attended a lot of funerals in Virginia and in South Carolina with Hank Sr.’s family. I was photographing a lot of funerals because I wanted to find ways to explore ideas about testimony and personal narratives in family and the connections that people framed about their lives and how their lives were connected to the land and to the history. As I shared earlier, I reference my mom, your grandmother, who lived until she turned 100. The women who visited her shop shared stories about their lives. Mom was a good listener and mentor.

So, I was looking at things that I thought were beautiful, but I didn't use the term "beautiful" as often as I wished I had because in art school, beauty was seen as frivolous.

KBRight.

DWAnd I didn't have the words that we have now to redefine it. I believe that beauty is sacred. I would sit and look people going into a church and watch how people place the crucifix, or the cross. This was in the '70s and from my childhood days. There was a sense that beauty was in seeing simplicity, or simplicity in beauty. There's this simple beauty in the way they would place a photograph or an image of the pastor or a person in the church. There were things that they would frame in that history that I would watch and make photographs of. I also photographed a lot of weddings of family members as well. I didn't want to photograph weddings because people were not always beautiful brides, but they wanted to be beautiful brides. (laughter)

KBYeah. (laughter)

DWThe brides would be giving me a hard time about some of the photographs, and I just tried my best to make the photographs. But that's that connection. Weather was important too, especially in New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi due to the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast. It changed the landscape. There were a number of places where I found beauty in the destruction—it was a conundrum for me to try to work out the images. And even though people lost their land or parts of their homes, they stayed. So how do you translate beauty in that way? That's something that I was curious about, the commitment that families had to the land that they own and live on.

KBI want to return to your ability to complicate the notion of beauty and therefore broaden the viewer's experience of the beautiful, which is what I'm hearing you talk about. It sounds like you’re opening up space within that terminology—beauty—for things that are more complex or unconventional. I see that in so much of your practice as an artist. You’re getting the viewer to look and experience beauty in a way that they potentially hadn't conceived of before. When they look at your work, they really have to take the time to sit in that space. I want to return to that but before we get there, let’s talk about the biographical because when I hear you talk about your experience traveling with Uncle Hank to these different places in the South, it also makes me think about your experience as a little girl and your family road-tripping and traveling to the South. What is the role that biography has played in the way that you see yourself as an artist? How has your own lived experience shaped your vision and your perspective and your approach to photography?

Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas, Sometimes I See Myself in You, 2008. © Deborah Willis; Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artists and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

DWThat's fascinating. I never made the connection that way, but I think maybe my father's own curiosity of the land and travel and beauty was significant. He loved going to flower shows and experiencing seeing flowers on display at different horticultural events. I was never interested in that, so I would turn away and look at other things. Then I realized that him being a policeman during that time in America and looking for respite, or looking for peace or something to dignify life, included being on the road and exploring.

We didn't know about the Green Book as children, but my father probably knew because he knew all the Black hotels to stop in, or all the places where we’d have a welcoming experience. Even though we weren't part of their family, they made us feel like we were. They made sure that we were safe. There is a place called the Hillside Inn. It was Peg Leg Bates's club in the Poconos. We would often go to the Poconos to have our vacation. The Hillside Inn had jazz music and it had spaces for children to play, swim, and swing. We could play ball, ping-pong, and even volleyball. I wasn't a contact-sport person because I didn't want to get hit by the ball, but I would sit and observe. It's amazing how as children we would be creative in making mud pies and art out of the clay of the land. We made excitement in those moments of comedy and just the everyday aspect of it. But it was worth mentioning and, if I’m following your question, it just guided me to look at different ways to find enjoyment as this middle child.

KBMmhmm.

DWI had a class in junior high school called Home Economics. I didn't particularly like it, but your mother loved sewing. I didn't have an interest in making the clothing, but I was always interested in styling the paper dolls. Your mother created the clothes, and I loved to style them. Our mother collected buttons, and she had tons of buttons, so I would make patterns with buttons. I played with that for a long time. I think that’s just another instance of me finding this creative path that was always a little different for me. I find appreciation in some of the works that I see that I didn’t think to capture with a camera, even though I had a camera, I wasn't using it to photograph objects back then. When I was younger, I only used the camera to photograph family members.

KBYour interest in women's stories and women's work, and the way that women tell stories when they're at work and Grandmama's beauty shop, leads me to think of the trajectory, then, around being in that space and redefining what beauty is. You spent so much of your time being situated in that environment.

DWI also learned about beauty from being with the men in our family, like my father and our Uncle Cecil Willis, Daddy's brother. They loved boxing. And on my mother’s side of our family, our cousin Melvina’s father also loved boxing. Philadelphia has a long boxing history, and Dad would often go to a boxing match or a gym in the Poconos where he knew someone was sparring. We have family photographs of boxers with their towels around their necks, wearing their robes. I didn't see the boxing, but I could see the photographs that they made of the community of men and my family, your family, who were part of it. During this time period in the 1940s through ’60s,** **men were also always very stylishly dressed. They had fancy, beautiful cars. There were aspects of beauty, everyday beauty. Like, our Uncle Nate (Nathan Chappell) who was Aunt Annie's husband. Annie Forman Chappell or Uncle Nate, my grandmother's brother-in-law, would take us to racing in Atco, New Jersey. He loved car racing and boxcar racing. We were just kids, and we’d pile up in the car every weekend, after chores, to attend these events with Uncle Nate.

Deborah Willis, *The Clothesline 3: Women’s work never praised never done (portraits of Nannie Helen Burroughs, Harriet Forten Purvis), *2020, archival print on Epson Ultra Premium Luster. Courtesy of the artist.

KBBeing in a boxing gym or at the car-racing track, in a conventional sense, there are certain social norms about what little girls do. You had these breaks from the norm where you were in masculine spaces. You showed up radically as little Black girls in these spaces. That seems to also connect to the way that you work with the concept of beauty. I’m thinking about your female bodybuilder series. Women in spaces that are traditionally defined by the men who occupy them and who are seen as supreme physical specimens. Or your boxing series and the essay written by curator Melvin Marshall who—

DWHe unfortunately passed away two days ago.

KBYes. He did. I’m sorry.

His essay on your boxing series, "Framing Beauty," focuses on these two bodies of work, women bodybuilders and boxers. That work stands out to me as a part of what we're talking about now, the way that you conceive of beauty and the feminine in spaces where it might be hard for other people to see it.

DWGrowing up in that environment, around a lot of women and men—my father had nine brothers and sisters, and my mother had thirteen brothers and sisters, and then they had cousins—I was exposed to a lot. Cousin Melvina’s husband, Bill Lathan, was a medical doctor, and he also practiced as a doctor in the boxing arena. This was the time period when we had Muhammad Ali, who was then Cassius Clay, and he became a transformative figure and integral in understanding masculinity and beauty at the time. Even though we found humor in his poems and his way of performing in boxing—and yes, I thought he was pretty (laughter)—I considered ways to acknowledge his beauty but also acknowledge the women who were in the ring.

I wasn’t focused on making photographs at this time in the ’70s because I was focused on raising a child and grad school. It wasn’t until later, in 1994, I decided to pursue a PhD in Cultural Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. But Melvina and her husband were going to the boxing gym and to Madison Square Garden. One day I said to her, "I'd love to go to Madison Square Garden with you, or to one of the Golden Gloves boxing matches and photograph." She had to get permission, of course, from the arena, and so that’s when I started making photographs. I started with the Golden Gloves, and then I went to the larger events at the boxing ring. I wasn’t only photographing the boxers. I also photographed the men who took care of the boxers. I loved the older men who were shaping and healing the hands of the boxers, who were just out of the ring or in the ring between the bouts. Then I started looking at the women who were the ring girls. There are ring girls in the Golden Gloves, too, and they were in different clubs where they created a boxing ring. It reminded me of August Strindberg, a Swedish playwright in the early twentieth century. He used the boxing ring as his theater.

I found it fascinating how boxing rings were placed in clubs, and the women were the entertainment in between the boxing ring. They wore scarves and were belly dancers. They were engaging, and I found that they relaxed the crowd from the brutality of the boxing. That's something I wanted to think about. The way that the women worked was incredibly exciting to me. They were listening to the audience, but they were also looking at the audience, and I wanted to photograph that.

I was invited to photograph the bodybuilders because there was a “Picturing the Modern Amazon” exhibition opening in 2000 at the New Museum. One of the curators asked me if I would be interested in photographing bodybuilders, and she connected me with Nancy Lewis, a bodybuilder who was living in Germany at the time. She knew I was a novice. I was just getting into teaching here at NYU as a Visiting Lecturer in 1999 and using the studio to make the photographs. The following year, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

KBMmhmm.

DWI was faced with these different moments in my life, from art to a traumatic experience of struggling to find out what it meant to have breast cancer. I kept looking at this woman, Nancy Lewis, who was just amazing. She knew her body. Her body was formed. She understood how to create the muscles, to make them shine, but also how to create different kinds of shapes that were absolutely amazing. Amazing to me because it was something I couldn't do. Wonder and beauty were formed in the way that she would pose. I asked her, "What's the best part of your body that you want me to photograph, focus on?" She'd say, "Of course, all of it." Hank Jr. was 22 years old. He was my assistant, and we made photographs at the Beacon Theater in New York City’s upper westside. Then, when I was faced with this horrible diagnosis, I had to step up in a different way. I had to face the idea of mortality. I had accepted a teaching position at Duke University and The University of North Carolina (UNC) in 2000, and I was teaching a class about beauty called Beauty Matters. After the diagnosis, I had to make a decision. That happened in May, right at the end of the semester. NYU was my dream job, and I needed to move forward in order to accept it.

KBMmhmm.

DWHaving that diagnosis handed down to me to, to deal with, was difficult. First you cry and then you try to figure out what the next step is. I had the lumpectomy and the doctor, who was a very active and fantastic woman, gave me a lot of hope. She said that I would probably need to have chemo and radiation but she could guarantee me fifteen years even though the other doctors would say, “No one should say that to you; you can't guarantee anyone that time period." But as I’ve often said, she gave me hope.

So, I had that experience at the same time that I was photographing the woman who was a bodybuilder. Here's these two extremes that I was dealing with at the time. Then, when I had to go through chemo, I had to slow down and I couldn’t accomplish as much as I’d hoped to do as an artist. That’s when I started photographing my own body and how it changed and losing my hair. I had sisterlocks. Oh, they were so fantastic, and they were crocheted hair. I’d gotten it done in California so it was Hollywood all the way. But when I lost my hair, the people who were also going through chemo treatment did not want me to sit in the room with them because I didn't wear a scarf or a hat or that covered my head. It reminded them too much of their own mortality and their pain. I realized then, even in illness, beauty has an impact. That’s when I decided to start photographing myself. It was difficult to make these photographs and see my body change in that way.

KBThere's such bravery in that decision to bear witness to one's own mortality. It's really fascinating for me to hear you talk about that experience relative to the bodybuilder series because although I knew about these things happening simultaneously, hearing you talk about them in tandem really puts it in a different perspective. To think about you transitioning from photographing this bodybuilder, these soft, beautiful photographs of this hard body, and the wonderful dichotomy between how you're utilizing the technology of the image relative to this very muscular frame and then having to apply that same kind of witness and softness to your own body in a time of stark vulnerability is, for me, eye-opening. It’s a revelation in how art gives the armature by which you can approach your relationship to your own body in a really transformative time in your life.

DWWhen we think about what mattered at that time, which was starting a career, teaching at a premier university, how do you embrace your family at that time?

You visited me when I was going through the chemo. You were in North Carolina as a student. It really meant a lot to me to have you there. When women artists have these experiences, they say, "Oh, well, you can't work because you have this." The Dean at NYU, Mary Schmidt Campbell, said, "You can take off a semester, do whatever you want, and just focus on healing." I said, "No, I'm gonna teach." I wasn’t going to have anybody say, "Oh, she's hired, and now she's not gonna teach. Oh, she has cancer; that means she's going to die." All of these battles that I was trying to protect myself from. The first day of my radiation was September 11, 2001.

KBWow.

DWSo that just said, "Wow!" in terms of bodies in question.

Deborah Willis, Jesus is the way, Eatonville, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

KBYes.

DWThat day I was traveling uptown to get my first treatment and, on my way downtown, there were all these fire trucks passing by. I saw all these beautiful firemen standing on the trucks. They were looking at me, and I was looking at them thinking, Where are they going?

I had no idea because I wasn't listening to the news. I was listening to my head and thinking about my own mortality. After that first session, I walked out and everyone said, "Did you hear what happened?" I hadn’t. And they said that downtown was closed. I walked all the way to the Village, past Fourteenth Street from Eightieth and Third Avenue.

KBAfter your radiation treatment?

DWYes, after radiation. And then I had to go back the next day because I had to have radiation every day for six weeks.

When I did look at the news, I had to decide what mattered: The political news, the personal news. How do I face this? I remember seeing all of these people walking from downtown with soot, white paint, everything, dust all over their bodies. They were just walking past me, and everyone was in shock. I decided I needed to photograph 9/11 events, and so I photographed in tribute to the firemen, most of whom were probably lost, and who I happened to look in the eyes on their way to the towers. They were young, they were beautiful, handsome, determined. That's something that I wanted to document. I also started photographing all of the firehouses and the tributes that they had outside that people left for the community. I just photographed the aftereffects of 9/11. I never traveled down to the actual Twin Towers, but I photographed in my neighborhood.

I kept making images and teaching my course, Beauty Matters, trying to absorb the students in the politics of beauty, and this question: How do we reflect on the times, on this period? That's what kept me going while I was going through six weeks of radiation: Teaching.

I also taught studio photography classes directing independent projects. I also, in the midst of research and writing about Black photographers some of the projects included, focused on healing then and writing my dissertation which began as the book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840-1940 and then ended up changing to the New Negro Image in Photography. I received my PhD in 2002.

Deborah Willis, Ms. Nandi's House, 2021, North Philadelphia, PA. Courtesy of the artist.

KBI was reading the essay by Melvin Marshall and its use of the word "beauty." He writes that you resist the urge to define beauty, and that's one of the things that I said here, but I want to take a moment to reposition that. Rather than defining beauty, you would rather reflect it, and this is something that he gleans from interviews that you've done about your work with beauty. What is your response to that distinction between defining beauty and reflecting it? And what are the ways in which you think that approach shows up in your work?

DWYou know, I didn’t discover that essay until 2015. So how do I think about it today? You curated Progenyin 2009 at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Progeny: Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas, is a selection of photographs by me and Hank Jr.—a mother-son duo. By 2015, we were both notable, award-winning artists. The exhibition of 48 photographs and 2 videos was the first collaborative venture undertaken by us, including works we created together alongside works we’d done independently. For this project, we drew upon our relationship with each other, producing work that encompasses the influences of our extended family. The photographs on view were positioned at the intersection of our practices. My influence as a mother and artist is apparent in my son's work and, conversely, Hank Jr. skillfully composed images have impressed themselves upon my visual imagination. The result was an exquisitely thoughtful medley that highlights the impact of family, history, and memory on the processes of artistic production.

KBAnd also Express Newark, In Pursuit of Beauty. That was 2018. The exhibit, "Deborah Willis: In Pursuit of Beauty: Imaging Closets in Newark and Beyond," featured large, colorful images that explored the ways beauty is represented through the intimate space of the closet by depicting people through their articles of clothing. Shine Portrait Studio at Express Newark mounted the exhibit, its first large-scale artistic endeavor, which stopped visitors in their tracks as they navigated all three floors of the beautiful nearly two-year-old facility. Your photographs in Express Newark have felt like being surrounded by family portraits, adding warmth and depth to the space. In addition, the large 200-page softcover book features your photographs from the Express Newark exhibition, as well as images from an earlier series you did exploring beauty, which are used to contextualize the largely Newark-based project. More than 100 color images in all are included. The exhibition played on the concept of “the closet” as a metaphor for the psychological parts of ourselves that are kept most private, or hidden from public view. Your images in this exhibition explored these innermost aspects of ourselves through actual closet spaces, offering a glimpse into how we perform our identities and image ourselves to the world. I recall that you photographed the closets of residents in Newark and surrounding towns, New York City, and around the world to examine the complex relationship between self-fashioning and identity in contemporary culture.

DWI remember people always asked me, "Are you defining beauty?” and “Are you making a statement about beauty?” It’s like they’re saying, Beauty is so frivolous—why would you do a creative project about beauty? Why would you think about this? What I had to reveal, I guess, to myself and to others is that I'm not defining it. I'm exploring it. I think beauty is reflexive and reflective in terms of your own minds. I was compelled, I believe, not only because of the experience I had going through chemo, but I was compelled because of the history of Black people. They never talked about beauty and Black people in the nineteenth century. There was always a stereotyped image of this repulsive Black figure. When I see images in the history books or in historical collections that I've visited over time, they were beautiful people in these collections that were overlooked by historians and cultural anthropologists, people who put bodies on display at World's Fair. I wanted to combat these stories. People say things like, "Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder," or "Beauty is within." I wanted to ask questions about how we engage with it today and how we engaged with it then. When I started finding ways to have a precise meaning of what beauty is—I remember reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and she questioned how we realize beauty. One answer she provided was "Beauty is . . ." That's all. When I read that out of context of the whole parts of her work, I was able to accept this whole notion of "Beauty is . . ." It's not defining. It is what we have in front of us so we're immersed in it.

KBYeah.

Deborah Willis, Eatonville Clothesline, Florida, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

DWI was always fascinated with Toni Morrison and enjoyed reading her work, even though it was difficult sometimes. I could not understand some of the things in The Bluest Eye, or didn't agree, but I appreciated the fact that she understood pain for people who did not have opportunities to reflect on and think about their own lives. She created a collective way of how to think about beauty. I found her work arresting. She is a Willis. Her mother was Ramah Willis. We had a chance to meet maybe thirty years ago, and she said to me, “I always wondered if you were a relative because my family, we're Willises.” I asked Aunt Isabel and she said, "Oh, yes She is! You know that the Willis's moved to Ohio, to Texas, to Virginia.” Because their family had eighteen or nineteen brothers and sisters that moved to different parts of the country. When I saw Toni Morrison’s documentary and engaged with her in different ways over the years, I've always felt that the substantial aspect of her research was focused on women and family and how the voices of some of the women in her stories helped me and guided me.

KBI want to build off that and continue to think about reflecting on beauty rather than defining it. You mentioned In Pursuit of Beauty, which I curated at Express Newark in 2018, while you were an artist-in-residence and I was curator-in-residence there. To me, that is exemplary of how you work. "Beauty is . . ." the multiplicity of stories that people tell around the items that they consider to be beautiful. For that project, you were going into people's closets and asking them to pick out the things that are the most beautiful to them, and to tell that story. You photographed those items, and the people with those items. Part of the project at SHINE Portrait Studio at Express Newark was recording the narrative, sort of like the oral history we're doing now. To me, that's really quintessential for how you approach the subject. Your ability to allow for the multiplicity of those stories to compound how one thinks of or experiences beauty is profound. The easy way would be to take the prescription of what we are told is beautiful through mainstream media or common narratives. But you seep in between all of those ideals by allowing people to express from their own, intimate place, like walking into someone's closet and having them express to you why they treasure an object and being able to create the space for them to even claim beauty.

And particularly with that project, these were people, some we knew, some we didn't, who were wanting to participate in that intimate moment with you, entering a closet and expressing joy through the story of how they come to have an object and why it is meaningful. It showed the power of your practice; you captured these stories that are a part of them. That's why I think it's important that you mention Toni Morrison, this storyteller, because your work is also very much imbued and propelled by story. What do you think about the element of story and how you photograph?

Deborah Willis, Series #2: In Pursuit of Beauty: *Imaging Closets in Newark and Beyond, *Villa La Pietra. Courtesy of the artist’s website.

DWI don't even know how I started with the closet project. Probably because I have a closet full of shoes. (laughter) I love shoes. I was apprehensive at first about asking people to tell their stories and photographing their closets. I remember seeing an exhibition by a woman artist who focused on her grandmother's closet. I thought, first of all, that's an ambitious project for me to even consider because how do you invite yourself into someone else's space and closet? I started reflecting on the women who attended church when I was a kid, and how I'd love, even as an adult, seeing how granddaughters would hug and lean on their grandmother’s shoulder, or fall asleep on a shoulder at church. This is a memory and image that has followed me from childhood to today. The grandmothers were decked out in their hats, with their little fur collars, and jewelry that they treasured. They walked into church expecting to be acknowledged, seen, as capable of wearing these fancy clothes that they purchased, or received as a hand-me-down. I wanted to think about how people sacrifice to purchase things that they found pleasurable. So, I just started photographing people's closets and asking, “What's this item? Why did you keep it so long? Can you still wear it?" These were interrogating questions. They were difficult questions, but people were excited about being accomplices in this project of mine. They wanted to also talk about the grandmother who passed down a fur coat. The first person was Ntozake Shange. I visited her to interview her for something for the Schomburg. She had a dress hung above her closet. I think it was a dress that she wore to see Josephine Baker. There was so much excitement in the way she talked about wearing this dress that she probably couldn't wear any longer, but it was an iconic object in her house. I found it fascinating that she could actually create a new standard to celebrate objects. It wasn’t hidden in the closet. It was outside of the closet, so that she could look at it every day as an art piece. Before this project became an exhibition, I was trying to think of creative ways to share my excitement about fashion and fashioning the self, but also telling this story through the history of family memories.** **There were always storytelling moments. As you know, we grew up with women who were storytellers.

KBYes, yes.

Deborah Willis, Portrait of Langston Hughes in his historic home. A sunday stroll in Harlem. January 2026. Courtesy of the artist.

DWSome of them exaggerated stories, but there were always stories about growing up in the Depression. Grandma Foreman made cakes and pies to sell for five or ten cents to the men or women coming home from work who wanted some kind of dessert. These pies that I heard about all my life were a sense of joy for my mother and her sisters who would dash home with the coins from selling Grandma Foreman's pies. They would tell these stories over and over and over. Our aunts were singers, and they enjoyed their own company. They had a lot of friends, but they didn't need the sense of friendship—they didn't even need an audience—because they enjoyed themselves. People would always stop by our houses, so their stories were always being told. They had solid stories about memories of joy, and that's something that I wanted to explore with them and with the people that I visited for the closet project.

There were joyful memories that they shared from a mirror, from a wig. When I lost my hair, my aunt and uncle, Uncle Cecil and Aunt Lithan Willis, came to visit me from Philadelphia, and I was living in D.C. I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1992 to assist Claudine K. Brown, Undersecretary and museum educator at the Smithsonian’s National African American Museum project. I was hired to locate materials and objects for the proposed museum, which eventually became the National Museum of African American History and Culture. So, when Uncle Cecil and Aunt Lithan came to visit, they gave me an afro wig to wear. (laughter) I said, "I don't want to wear an afro wig!” It’s such a funny story because when I started wearing my hair in an afro in the ’60s, they didn’t even want to speak to me. It was like, How complicated can you be? That’s the first thing that came to my mind when Uncle Cecil came to visit me with this afro wig. When I stopped straightening my hair, he was like, We don't have this kind of hair in our family. Because his wife's hair was long and down her back. Anyway, of course, I gave the wig to my mom because she always could refashion a wig for any client. My mom laughed at me and asked, “Why won't you wear the wig?" And then I would remind her what happened when I came back from visiting California in 1968. “Remember how they teased me when I came back from California with my afro?" (laughter)

Deborah Willis, A Toast to Harlem, New York City, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

KBYeah.

DWSo there are hopeful stories, funny stories, and some devastating stories. I think that storytelling guides us into who we are. It shapes us. There are people who don't like to have stories told, but anyway, that's something that I found.

KBThat generation that Grandmom and her siblings come from or were born in, the Depression years, is considered the Silent Generation. Listening to you talk about how that is really the impetus for where you get your appreciation for storytelling is ironic as they are considered the Silent Generation. Those were the folks that told the stories of their time and their experiences in that time. That is an interesting dichotomy. Maybe it's because of the economic situation, but from a lived perspective, it is not the Silent Generation. Those are the storytellers.

DWYeah. They were the storytellers. They also created their own clothing; they embellished the clothing because many of them, including our family members, were domestic workers. Aunt Annie worked for a woman who gave her clothing, and she embellished those clothes with costume jewelry and added other things that made it her own. They had a sense of pride for themselves, and for their children—some of them didn't have children—we were their children. That's something that I witnessed.

I just want to say I’m glad to talk about my art and connecting it to storytelling, which I have never talked about before.

KBWhere you are now in terms of what drives you as an artist—what are you working on?

Deborah Willis, Mirroring Hortense, 2017. First exhibited at La Pietra, Florence, Italy. Courtesy of the artist’s website.

DWWell, I'm still fascinated with spirituality. I'm fascinated with how it's performed in different venues. I always think about how people dress on Saturday night and Sunday morning, because when they visited Mom's beauty shop, they were either preparing for Saturday night or Sunday morning.

With my own work, I also think about photographic archives, how to use memory in the work. An exhibition that I have been working on collecting portraits of Black Civil War soldiers, and having the opportunity to tailor an exhibition focused on these portraits of soldiers who were looking for freedom, is fascinating; and also, with my own work, with art committed to memory and then curating an exhibition, Artists Committed to Memory. I'm doing a dual role: Making photo quilts with my dad's work and ties—we still have some of his ties—and also creating a video project with Joan Baez's song "Civil War" with a dancer-choreographer, Djassi Johnson.

Djassi helped develop an idea that explored my meditating on the photographs of Civil War soldiers with the song.** *So, with that, I'm thinking of continuing the photographing in the closets. The exhibition that opened at the Met on dandyism, *Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. *I love thinking about legacy and the history of fashion and dress. I'm continuing to photograph on the streets. It’s called *Sundays in Harlem, and I photograph people after church, going to restaurants. Sometimes I’m photographing through the window. I’ve also been photographing Langston Hughes's house here in Harlem. A$AP Rocky was photographed by Tyler Mitchell in Langston Hughes's home, and I happened to see it. I'm in an exhibition that's opening in Nevada, but it has the same images from Langston Hughes’s home. I photographed Langston's typewriter because what mattered to Langston was that typewriter that told the stories. The exhibition is at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, May 3, 2025 - February 15, 2026. It’s titled When Langston Hughes Came to Town and it* *explores the history and legacy of Langston Hughes through the lens of his largely unknown travels to Nevada and highlights the vital role Hughes played in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. So, photographing the objects, what matters, and having it shown in some of these museum spaces continues to be important to me. With the Eatonville exhibition, it was important for me to photograph that town and create an exhibition about Zora Neale Hurston’s church, her Bible, her front porch. These are the moments that I'm photographing and continuing to create stories about.

Deborah Willis, Langston Hughes’ Typewriter, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

KBI really appreciate the way that your projects continue to unfold and build upon each other. Although you have these separate bodies of work, there are all of these through lines, and I'm really excited to see what you are making next.

DWYeah. I'm going to continue photographing pregnant women. And I want to create a book about birthing. We know the difficult aspects of child mortality with Black women, and I want to continue to create work that will draw attention to that.

KBWell, I would like to be a part of that book project, so I'm just putting my bid in now.

Since 2014, BOMB’s Oral History Project (OHP) has published in-depth, longform interviews with visual artists of the African diaspora. Beginning in 2022, focus cities were expanded from New York to include New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

*The Oral History Project is made possible with a major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support is provided by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. *

An excerpt of “Deborah Willis by Kalia Brooks” appeared in BOMB Magazine Issue 173/Fall 2025 (purchase the issue *here*).

Oral History Project Advisors

New York:

Sanford Biggers

Linda Goode Bryant

Melvin Edwards

Thelma Golden

Janet Olivia Henry

Kellie Jones

Odili Donald Odita

Victoria Rogers

Lowery Stokes Sims

Mickalene Thomas

Carrie Mae Weems

Stanley Whitney

Jack Whitten (in memoriam)

Chicago:

Lisa Graziose Corrin

Janet Dees

Darby English

Patric McCoy

Nyeema Morgan

Rebecca Zorach

New Orleans:

Nic[o] Brierre Aziz

Ron Bechet

Pia Ehrhardt

Rebecca E. Snedeker

Detroit:

McArthur Binion

Mary-Ann Monforton

The Oral History Project’s expansion to Chicago and New Orleans is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support for New York is provided by the Dedalus Foundation, Toni L. Ross, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.