The Brooklyn Rail

The first picture Coreen Simpson ever took was a mental one. The New York-born photographer was a Brooklyn stoop kid in the 1940s and ’50s who recalls sitting on the steps while her foster mother combed her hair and she pressed ‘click’ in her mind to bank the visual feast of Black fashion that crossed her eyeline; glamorous women, Black Dandies in orange suits and alligator shoes. Later, she would graduate from mentally logging these images to formally logging them across five decades of photographic work. Coreen Simpson: A Monograph—the second book in the Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series edited by Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis—is the first monograph for the photographer, now in her eighties. Over 179 images spanning her studio photography, street and fashion photography, and mixed-media collages illuminate Simpson’s gaze. The volume reveals a signature visual language that uses the manifold articulations of Black style—across sports, youth, street, and fashion culture—to showcase the radiance and infinite textures of Black life.

Simpson’s interest in photography began out of frustration. In the 1970s, she was an enterprising freelance lifestyle writer for the magazine Unique NY. She continually found herself unhappy with the images selected to accompany her work. She felt that images guided people’s eyes in magazines, so proper image and text pairing would not only elevate a piece, but also allow readers to see the world the right way: through her eyes. The monograph’s editors, in a joint opening note, remark that Simpson photographed all of her subjects with “an affirming gaze.” Simpson cites James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, and Richard Avedon as professional influences. “He made people look important,” she recalls of Avedon’s social photography in the monograph. This became a guiding principle of her own photographic practice as seen in early career subjects; B-boys, clubgoers (at Cotton Club, Area, The Fun House), old-timers strutting around Harlem, bodybuilders, an all-male drag ballet company, a street preacher, a chef highlighted in a feature on Black hospitality workers. Simpson made Black people of all walks of life look important. Her work, which consisted primarily of close-up portraiture or wide shots cropped to draw focus onto single subjects, is devoted not just to taking pictures of Black people, but to teaching us how to look at Black people, especially Black women.

In her “Church Ladies” series included in the book, she documented the fashions of Black churchgoing women from Harlem, New York to Zambia, Africa beginning in the 1970s through the 1990s. The photographs are all high contrast black-and-white images. In one, a woman dressed in matching white skirt, shoes, bag, and voluminous church hat stands in front of a Harlem dress shop that abuts a church. Behind her, Sunday service attendees can be seen rubbernecking. An ordinary moment is constructed to look like a fashion editorial, with an emphasis on the woman’s direct eye contact and delicate stance, to cropped framing that makes nearby cars and buildings feel like props.

While describing a photograph Simpson took of Oprah Winfrey in one of the book’s accompanying essays, writer and academic Salamishah Tillet characterizes the look the two share as “almost conspiratorial.” Simpson’s photos of other famous Black women in the book—Eartha Kitt (backstage for Timbuktu! in 1978), Diana Ross (at the 1978 opening of The Wiz), Coretta Scott King (at the Met in the early 1990s)—share this same sense of palpable familiarity and ease, a kind of conspiratorial intimacy. But this is something Simpson shares with all of the Black women she photographs—celebrity or civilian—each turned to face her, welcoming and trusting her gaze.

Simpson’s work also touches on the conceptual, as seen in surreal collages she made throughout her career by reworking extra prints. Among the images from her “Aboutface” collage series featured in the book is Alva with Clock (1991/2021), a photograph of the back of her goddaughter’s braided head on which she superimposed a large analog clock, and Ntozake Shange (1997/2021), which layers an image of the Black feminist playwright atop a cascading wave backdrop, the writer’s face disfigured by a large open mouth mid-scream in lieu of her head. Her use of photomontage adds depth and movement to her photography by freely associating images of clocks, the cosmos, displaced body parts, or geometric jewelry with and within the Black body. In her work, a body can be a timekeeper, a bullhorn, an abyss.

Her dedication to the elevation of Black women effectuated another important dimension of her artistry: her work as a jewelry designer. It was work that, much like photography, was self-assigned and birthed from dissatisfaction. In an interview with Willis in the book, Simpson recalls how a Black editor friend who worked at “a white magazine” asked her for a modified version of a piece of jewelry Chanel had just released, a cameo—three-dimensional jewelry popularized in Victorian England that featured raised reliefs typically of sculpted idealized female beauties like Greek goddesses and noblewomen in profile. But the client wanted one with a Black woman on it. Though her research revealed variations like the blackamoor cameo habillé had existed in Europe since the nineteenth century, Simpson could not find a cameo with a modern Black woman’s silhouette in America. So, she decided to make her own, a decision predicated on style but ineluctably political. This extension of her artistry into wearable art marked a transition from cataloguing Black fashion to shaping it. Since its creation in the 1990s, Simpson’s Black Cameo has been worn by significant Black female cultural figures like Winnie Mandela, Rosa Parks, Rihanna, and, of course, herself. “You don’t have to be black to wear it,” reads an excerpt from a 1991 Glamour article included in the book, “just stylish.”