Small Towns, Black Lives: African American Communities in Southern New Jersey

by Wendel A. White, Deborah Willis, Stedman Graham

A single photographic print may be "news", a "portrait," "art," or, "documentary," or any of these, all of them, or none. Among the tools of social science graphs, statistics, maps, and text documentation by photograph now is assuming place. Dorothea Lange, 1940 The photographs in Wendel White’s Small Towns, Black Lives are the kinds of hybrids Lange described and anticipated in her statement. The exhibition and book form a personal album revealing the layers of meaning and history that he carefully uncovered. His project to document African American communities in southern New Jersey began in much the same way that many photographers before him had set out to record a place or people. Neither stridently documentary nor self-consciously arty, White’s images straddle two worlds. They adopt the cool reserve of certain recent fine art photographers – Lewis Baltz, for example. Yet he is also true to the sincere lens of many of photography’s great documentarians—such as Lange or Jacob Riis, who documented the horrid slum conditions in New York’s Lower East Side or Lewis Hine, who took part in the influential Farm Security Administration documentary project from 1937 to 1942. White has produced a body of work that is uniquely personal and profoundly informative. His photographs thoughtfully ask us to look without preconceptions at the history he has uncovered. Charles Ashley Stainback, Curator

180 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003