Vision & Justice, the newest issue of Aperture magazine, was featured on the front page of the the June 27, 2016 Arts section in The New York Times and included quite the shout-out to chair Deb Willis. Sandra Stevenson interviewed guest-editor Sarah Lewis on the extensive work she did in bringing together the first issue devoted entirely to black photography:
As a picture editor at The New York Times, I think a lot about authenticity. I grew up in Wyoming, with very few people of color, so when my mother saw them in the paper, she’d say,“Why is it that we’re just like these black blobs with eyes and teeth?” It would drive her crazy. And then on my father’s side, they were from central Louisiana, and every time we would visit my grandmother, she would have portraits and photos from back in the 1800s of family members. That’s what drew me to photography. What drew you to photography?
...We had a flood in my house growing up. I was maybe single digits, 8 or 9. And we had to move out of the house. We came home and it was just flooded. And our neighbor next door — we lived in an entirely white neighborhood and we built it — came by to help. And she was just struck still and stopped at the entryway, she didn’t come in, not because of the water, but because she was shocked to see these photographs we had of my great-great-grandparents. And I’ll never forget what she said: “I don’t even have any pictures of my great-great-grandparents.”
And it occurred to me a) that these were unique; b) that there was significance to having a visual record in the form of a photograph of African-Americans in that time period. And it made me want to explore the history and understand that.
Additionally, Deborah Willis’s landmark book, “Black Photographers 1840-1940: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography,” was in my childhood home. That was the book that made me interested in the relationship between race and photography. It sat alongside our own family pictures in the living room table for years. As an only child, I would spend hours just poring over it. As you can imagine, the fact that Deborah Willis is now a colleague and mentor is incredibly meaningful to me.