The African Lookbook is a look back into the history of African women through striking and subversive photographs – featuring an introduction by Edwidge Danticat and a foreword by Jacqueline Woodson.

Most of the photographs of African women that the present generation was accustomed to seeing growing up dealt with African women in an anthropological sense. They were portrayed as either exotic creatures or subjects of war and economic suffering – basically “poverty porn.”

Curator Catherine E. McKinley taps into her personal collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a herstory spanning a hundred-year arc (from 1870-1970). Among these images are examples of the earliest photography on the African continent.

McKinley demonstrates a different perspective on African women – women with a cosmopolitan and very modern style, who reclaimed tools that occasioned their oppression (the camera, the sowing machine, etc) and masterfully repurposed them for their own purposes of self-definition and self-determination.

Works by African artists and studios, known and unknown, help to shape this new narrative, which captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across the centuries. There are also works by an assortment of Europeans. Some of these composed women in the nude, undoubtedly revealing the power dynamics in the relationships between White foreigners and the Black female sitters.

McKinley emphasizes that in the midst of exploitation, there was also resistance, which found its expression in unexpected ways – even if only in turning away from the colonial gaze.

There is much to learn from the photos and the stories within on the beauty, resilience, and heritage of African women.

About the Author

Catherine’s practice as a non-fiction writer expands from memoir and historical narrative to the visual and material arts. She specializes in African photography, African and African-American contemporary artwork; textile traditions; fashion and costume and it’s related trade histories.

Catherine McKinley is a former Fulbright Scholar and a critically acclaimed author and curator. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (B.A. Literature) and New York University (M.A. Art); she taught writing at both schools.

Her books include the critically acclaimed Indigo, a journey along the ancient indigo trade routes in West Africa, and The Book of Sarahs, a memoir of growing up Black and Jewish from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Her recent exhibitions include “Conflict & Skin” at Gallatin Gallery, NYU, which explored the 1904 German – Herero War and the resulting genocide, and the persistence of Victorian design in Heroro women’s expression of trauma, resistance and indigeneity, and “Aunty! African Women in the Frame, 1870 to the Present, Selections from the McKinley Collection,” which debuted at United Photo Industries, Dumbo, Brooklyn in 2019. That archive is featured in this book.