Deana Lawson is an African-American photographer who shoots intimate staged portraits that explore Blackness, legacy, and collective memory. Her practice borrows from simultaneous visual traditions, ranging from photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and vernacular family album photographs. Lawson is visually inspired by the materiality of black culture and its expression as seen through the body and in domestic environments. Lawson has traveled the world creating images of black people living in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jamaica, Ethiopia, the southern United States, and her neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
In a 2018 New York profile—author Zadie Smith spoke of how Lawson’s lens liberates her subjects from the earthly constraints of capitalism and colonial histories, turning them into gods.
“Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa,” Smith wrote. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”
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