The Black Photographers Annual Volume 2 [Hardcover Issue]

Brooklyn: Black Photographers Annual, 1974. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. The second of four volumes seeking to define "a new Blackness, real and strong as our history, pushing consciousness toward a new place" through photography (quoted from the first volume). At the time Joe Crawford started this series, African American photographers had been almost completely left out of the photographic literature. See the essay by Carla Williams in Aperture 223 for a short study of the place of these "annuals" (which were issued several years apart) in photographic history.

This volume reproduces with well-printed halftones the images of 51 black photographers from the US, England, and Canada. Contributors include Roy DeCarava, James Van DerZee, Ming Smith, St. Clair Bourne, and Chuck Stewart. Three photographers, P. H. Polk, Jimmie Manns, and Ted Gray, are given portfolios of several images, with a biographical introduction. Gray offers one of the most compelling and disturbing images in the book. It's a play on the trope of people caught by a camera in mid jump. In Gray's reinterpretation, a Black man stands in front of a dead tree with a broken rope-possibly the remains of a child's tire swing. Gray's camera catches him in mid jump, his neck ackwardly bent, recreating the pose of dead men hanging from a lynching tree.

The images are mostly untitled, captioned only with the photographer's name and a place.

102, [6] pages. 8-3/4 by 10 inches. First edition, hardcover issue in printed cream-colored boards. A fragile volume, with cracking to the corners and the base of the spine. Uncommon in hardcover.