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Part of
Photography in Children's Literature
Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 17] 2023
► pp. 274–296

Chapter 12
The mirror and multiplicity

Photographic books for the young during the United States’ Black Arts Movement of the 1970s

Black creators in the 1970s used the photographic picturebook to recreate black identity and history. Whether tethering images to the logic of the alphabet, as do Yusef Iman and Jean Carey Bond, or deploying images to disrupt narratives of American history, as do Toni Morrison and June Jordan, creators recognized the multiple aesthetic and political possibilities engendered by an assemblage of images. The photograph seeks to mirror by fixing places and people on the page; and some narratives productively pull against closure, embracing instead the ongoing process of knowing black history through interpreting the sequence of photographs.

Article outline
  • The Black Arts Movement: Abecedaries ground the image
  • Weusi Alfabeti naturalizes a black alphabet
  • A is for Africa frames beauty through women and girlhood
  • Disrupting historiography through images
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.17.12cap
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