Environmental Images
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Through a Lens Darkly Black Photographers Summary
In Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, filmmaker Thomas Harris opens with a personal narrative about his father, who is shown in old photographs as a lovely guy with a very sad, preoccupied aspect. We don’t learn much about his father but we travel back through the generations looking at formal and candid photographs which were taken by Harris’s grandfather. Through a Lens Darkly alternates between the Harris brothers' artistic life and conversations with photographers and professors, while exhibiting the work. The film looks at the photographic record that black Americans have produced of their personal lives, as well as how they have been portrayed by the greater society. The major focus of this exhibition, however, is on the contrasting legacy of black photographers, which Harris and Willis trace back to a Cincinnati daguerreotype manufacturer in the 1840s, whose clients included well-to-do black families and white abolitionists.Those
