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‘Reflections in Black’ celebrates history of Black photography with expanded issue

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‘Reflections in Black’ celebrates history of Black photography with expanded issue

Four African American women sit on the steps of a building at Atlanta University in Georgia in this 1890s photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The image is one of the hundreds included in Reflections in Black, written and edited by scholar and NYU professor Deborah Willis.

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Deborah Willis, professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has released an updated anniversary edition of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present.

Deborah Willis, professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has released an updated anniversary edition of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present.

Willis: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn; Cover Image: Maud Sulter.


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Willis: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn; Cover Image: Maud Sulter.

For decades, Deborah Willis has dedicated her career to unearthing, cataloging and showcasing Black photographers and photographs of Black people. The MacArthur “Genius Award” winner is the author of a spectacular collection of books including the seminal Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present.

Twenty-five years after its publication, a new edition of Reflections in Black is out with 130 new images and a gallery show inspired by the book. In the expansion of this book, Willis considered the effects of migration and the importance of images for people forced to leave home.

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“The aspect of migration is a central way of me reading these images, today there are so many people who are from the diaspora that are photographers now,” she said. “When families had to leave home, with disaster today, what do you take with you now? Photographs are what people are taking.”

Morning Edition’s Michel Martin visited Willis at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she teaches and leads the photo department.

Here are four takeaways from their conversation.

1. Willis’ upbringing shaped her love for photography

An interior view of a tobacco and newspaper store photographed by Daniel Freeman around 1917, from Reflections in Black.

An interior view of a tobacco and newspaper store photographed by Daniel Freeman around 1917, from Reflections in Black.

Estate of Dr. James K. Hill, Washington, D.C.


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Estate of Dr. James K. Hill, Washington, D.C.

Willis grew up in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where her mother had a beauty shop and kept what Willis calls: “the Black color wheel of magazines.”

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The publications included Ebony, Jet, and Tan and featured images that influenced her growing up. Her father, a policeman and tailor, was also an amateur photographer.

2. Reflections in Black started as an undergrad paper 

From Reflections in Black: Portrait of an unidentified woman taken by photographer J. P. Ball circa 1890s.

A portrait of an unidentified woman photographed by J.P. Ball in the 1890s, from Reflections in Black.

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.


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Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Willis was studying at the Philadelphia College of Art (the college merged with another institution to become the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1985. UArts closed its doors in 2024) when she asked a professor why Black photographers were missing from the history books.

“Where are the Black photographers?” she recalled. That question morphed into the monumental project that became Reflections in Black. She began her research by reading city directories.

“Because of segregation in the 19th century, I was able to identify with the asterisk the colored photographers … I created this list of 500,” she said.

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She took that list to the Schomburg Center in Harlem, where she found some of the photographers’ images and created portfolios for each one. Later, with the help of Richard Newman, her “publishing angel,” the paper she wrote as an undergraduate grew into a book.

3. Frederick Douglass understood photography as biography

Frederick Douglass was one of the most photographed people during the 19th century. The writer and abolitionist is known to have had about 160 photographs and portraits made of him.

“I believe in reading his words that photography was biography,” Willis said. “We’ve not found a photograph of him smiling.” She emphasized Douglass himself collaborated with the photographer behind the lens in part as an effort to counter degrading images of Black people.

4. Willis searched for “The Exhibit of American Negroes,” which W.E.B. Du Bois organized for the 1900 Paris Exposition 

Members of the First Congregational Church in Atlanta pose outside the church in this photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The image appears in W.E.B. Du Bois’ albums of photographs of African Americans in Georgia exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, and is included in Reflections in Black.

Members of the First Congregational Church in Atlanta pose outside the church in this photograph by Thomas E. Askew. The image appears in W.E.B. Du Bois’ albums of photographs of African Americans in Georgia exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, and is included in Reflections in Black.

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Wills first heard about the exhibit in the 1970s, when she went to the Library of Congress looking for photographs from it. She said staff told her the photographs didn’t exist.

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Twenty years later, photographs from the exhibit were retrieved by a young Black man working in the archives. “They didn’t exist because they weren’t processed,” Willis told NPR.

Du Bois, she said, understood the importance of photography and often asked, “Why aren’t there more Black photographers, Black men studying photography?”

The digital version of this interview was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi and Danielle Scruggs.

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What the postcards leave out: 5 moments in history that still echo along Route 66

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What the postcards leave out: 5 moments in history that still echo along Route 66
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Richard Mitchell, 84, of Albuquerque in 2016. Mitchell used the Green Book to drive across the United States in 1964. The travel guide “assured protection for Negro travelers.”

(Photo by Craig Fritz / For The Times
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Forty-four of the 89 counties along Route 66 were sundown towns, communities where it was encouraged for Black people to leave before dark — or else. Route 66 diners, motels and gas stations routinely refused service to Black travelers. In 1936, a Harlem postal worker named Victor Green began publishing the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to the hotels, restaurants and gas stations along the route that would serve Black travelers. More than 1,400 tourist homes (private residences that took in guests when hotels wouldn’t) were listed during the guide’s run.

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For Black families on Route 66, the Green Book was as essential as a spare tire. In Tulsa, the Greenwood District was once known as “Black Wall Street.” White thugs destroyed it in the 1921 Race Massacre. The community rebuilt and became a hub of Black commerce near the route. Springfield, Ill., was one of the first cities on Route 66 to offer services to Black travelers. It was also the site of the 1908 Race Riot, which helped spur the founding of the NAACP.

Lily Ho, 78, holds a photo of the Hayes Motel in Los Angeles. Her family has owned the motel for nearly 40 years

A vintage photo of the Hayes Motel in Los Angeles. It was featured in the Green Book, which listed places that served African Americans during the era of segregation.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

See what remains today: Only about 30% of Green Book sites along Route 66 are still standing. The DuBeau in Flagstaff, Ariz., once a Green Book listing, now operates as a motel. The recently shuttered Clifton’s in downtown Los Angeles sits at 7th and Broadway, the original terminus of Route 66. Route History Museum in Springfield is the only museum in the country dedicated to the Black experience on Route 66, housed in a 1930s Texaco station one block off the road. It offers a virtual reality experience that walks visitors through the Green Book cities of Illinois, including sundown towns.

Beyond the Green Book, other businesses that are worth a visit include Threatt Filling Station in Oklahoma, a Black-owned gas station (and safe haven for Black travelers) during the era of segregation, and the neon sign from Graham’s Rib Station, a beloved Black-owned restaurant for many years. It’s located at the local History Museum on the Square in Springfield, Mo.

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.

“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”

The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”

L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.

The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.

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Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.

“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”

A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.

The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”

Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”

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The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”

The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.

All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.

Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.

At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.

“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.

Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.

But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”

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The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.

Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.

With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.

The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.

When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.

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“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.

Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)

In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.

“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.

The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.

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These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.

Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”

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