Black Box: A Photographic Memoir

Black Box, a memoir by award-winning American photographer Dona Ann McAdams, combines fifty years of black and white photography with the photographer’s own short lyric texts she calls “ditties.” The book brings together McAdams’ striking historical images with personal reflections that read like prose-poems. Her photographs, taken between 1974 and 2024, document astonishing moments and people across decades of American life.

McAdams is famous, Joanna Howard writes in her afterword, for her uncanny ability “to be at the right place at the right time to document resistance, protest, and empowered agency across four or five decades of American culture.” For McAdams, the personal is political. She’s captured moments of her community’s history from the Queer Liberation Movement, the Culture Wars, and the Performance Art scene of the 1980s and 1990, to artist intellectual acquaintances like Angela Davis, Meredith Monk, and Maurice Sendak, and a host of others whose paths she crossed, including Harvey Milk, David Bowie, David Wojnarowicz, and John Malkovich. The book also features a prophetic, never-before published photograph of the twin towers on the morning of 9/11.

Black Box is rich in lyricism; a leitmotif of horses literally run throughout the book. “I was born in the Year of the Horse,“ McAdams opens her memoir, “and so I wanted to be one.”