Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images

The first title in Aperture’s Vision & Justice Series—featuring a collection of award-winning short essays by Maurice Berger that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture. Created and coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series reexamines and redresses historical narratives of photography, race, and justice.

‍Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, examines the transformational role photography plays in shaping ideas and attitudes about race and how photographic images have been instrumental in both perpetuating and combatting racial stereotypes. Written between 2012 and 2019 and first presented as a monthly feature on the New York Times’s Lens blog, Berger’s incisive essays help readers see a bigger picture about race through story-telling. By directing attention to the most revealing aspects of images, Berger makes complex issues comprehensible, vivid, and engaging. The essays illuminate a range of images, issues, and events: the modern civil rights movement; African American–, Latinx–, Asian American–, and Native American photography; and pivotal moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when race, photography, and visual culture intersected. They also examine the full spectrum of photographic imaging: from amateur to professional pictures, from snapshots to fine art, from mugshots to celebrated icons of photojournalism. Race Stories collects together Berger’s reader-friendly essays in their breadth and brilliance to encourage a broad range of readers to look at and think about photographs in order to better understand themselves and the diverse world around them. Copublished by Aperture and the New York Times.

Maurice Berger (born and died in New York, 1956–2020) was a cultural historian, curator, and writer, who spent much of his career studying and teaching racial literacy through innovative visual literacy projects. In influential essays, books, and provocative museum exhibitions, Berger gathered and presented compelling photographic images to engage and challenge readers and viewers into reconsidering both cultural and personal assumptions and prejudices. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (2000) and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2010), which was also was one of the premier projects mounted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and was nominated for an Emmy Award.