Vision & Justice Book Series

The Vision & Justice Book Series, a groundbreaking endeavor conceived by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and published by Aperture, is designed to address past omissions and contribute to the ongoing work of building a richer, more racially inclusive story of lens-based practices.

An extension of the work of the award-winning 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine, the Book Series centers the work of leading lens-based Black artists and related scholars and writers who have been vital to understanding the role of images in generating equity and justice in America.

Co-edited by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the series commences with three titles:

  • Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, the first posthumous collection of writings by cultural historian, curator, and writer Maurice Berger (1956–2020)

  • The first-ever monograph of Doug Harris’ work, which created a new visual vocabulary for the organizing efforts of the Civil Rights Movement

  • A survey of self-taught photographer Coreen Simpson’s work exploring the intersections of style, beauty, and representation


Co-editors

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis | Founder, Vision and Justice; John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University

Leigh Raiford | Author, leading scholar of Black visual culture, and professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley

Deborah Willis | MacArthur award-winning artist, historian, and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University


Advisory Board

Courtney R. Baker, Dawoud Bey, LeRonn Brooks, Jelani Cobb, Teju Cole, Huey Copeland, Vinson Cunningham, Awol Erizku, Cheryl Finley,  Nicole Fleetwood, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael B. Gillespie, Rujeko Hockley, Tyler Mitchell, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Richard Powell, Antwaun Sargent, Ming Smith, Salamishah Tillet, Carrie Mae Weems