American contemporary photographer and Princeton assistant professor Deana Lawson challenges conventional representations of black identity through carefully staged, intimate photographs of individuals, couples, and families in mostly domestic spaces.
Read MoreBorn in Rochester, New York—the hometown of Kodak—Deana Lawson studied photography at Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 2001. In 2004 she completed an MFA in photography at Rhode Island School of Design, and photography remains at the core of Deana Lawson's art. While she often presents found images, she is best known for her staged large-format colour photographs.
Lawson's photographs draw from traditions that include family albums, portraits, documentary photography, and the work of older black women like Carrie Mae Weems. Lawson's use of saturated colour, and the careful attention she pays to lighting and poses make her works distinctive. In Roxie and Raquel, New Orleans, Louisiana (2010), two individuals kneel, back-to-back, on a bed, the gold of their clothing reflecting the brightness and warmth of the yellow wall behind them.
With meticulous attention to detail, Lawson selects and heightens specific visual elements, such as plastic couch covers, lace curtains, items of clothing, skin, and artificial nails. These enhance the narratives played out by her carefully posed subjects—narratives relating to love, desire, sexuality, personal power, family, spiritual beliefs, and personal and social histories.
Deana Lawson's subjects are a combination of familiar faces from within her community, and strangers she meets on the street, on trains, in grocery stores, and during her travels. She establishes a strong relationship with each sitter to create mutual trust, building a natural sense of intimacy between artist and subject.
From the stardom captured in Deana Lawson's Rihanna portraits, to individuals from the deep South and Brooklyn, the depicted subjects come from diverse backgrounds and locations. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 allowed Deana Lawson to travel further abroad, expanding her repertoire to tell stories of black lives in places like Haiti, South Africa, Jamaica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia, alongside the United States.
Deana Lawson has steadily developed influence as an artist. Her Binky and Tony Forever (2009), in which a couple is captured in an embrace on the edge of a bed covered in a golden duvet, partly inspired and became the album cover for Blood Orange's Freetown Sound (2016). In 2020, Lawson also became the first photographer to receive the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and HUGO BOSS' Hugo Boss Prize.
Deana Lawson's work can be found in a range of public collections around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Deana Lawson, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston (2020); Centropy, Kunsthalle Basel (2020); Deana Lawson, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2019); Deana Lawson, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); Deana Lawson, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017); Deana Lawson, Art Institute of Chicago (2015).
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, Barbican Art Gallery, London (2020); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (2017); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Homebodies, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); New Photography 2011, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011).
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2020
