A New Book Gives Us the World As Seen by Black Female Photographers

n 1985, Arthur Ashe’s widow, the photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, published a historical survey that she called Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers. Viewfinders chronicled the work of the (largely disregarded) black female photographers that Moutoussamy-Ashe had meticulously unearthed, dating back to 1866. Now, 30 years after Moutoussamy-Ashe’s book, two Brooklyn-born photographers are picking up where she left off, with Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, an anthology featuring the work of over 100 female photographers of African descent from around the world.

The idea took root over a decade ago on a spring day in 2006, as a pair of best friends sat on the living room floor of an apartment in Crown Heights, flipping through Viewfinders. “Imagine if we had a book of all female black photographers. Imagine that,” Adama Delphine Fawundu recalled musing aloud to Laylah Amatullah Barryn.

Fawundu and Barryn fell in love with Viewfinders early in their careers. They regarded it as a bible of sorts, and treasured how it catalogued and highlighted the work of women artists whom they admired. But they also chafed at its singular existence. “A Forgotten Group of photographers is Revealed in Black and White,” read one 1986 review of the book. ‘Forgotten’ was an descriptor Barryn and Fawundu were determined to avoid.

Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora is named after Mmekutmfon ‘Mfon’ Essien, an acclaimed Nigerian-born photographer who diedof breast cancer in 2001, at age 34. Fawundu and Essien had worked together in the past; the two were set to show their work together at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers”in 2001. But Essien passed away the day before the show’s opening.

“It’s one thing to make images, but I think Laylah and I both have this thing in us— we want to do more: to preserve, to document, to make sure that when we are not here on this earth, the work is living beyond us,” Fawundu said. The book also features an introduction written by Dr. Deborah Willis, the chair of NYU’s photo and imaging department and a leading scholar and historian on African American photographers, a preface by the Brooklyn-based curator Niama Safia Sandy, and essays by Catherine McKinley, La Tanya S. Autry, and Fayemi Shakur.

Publishers passed on their initial idea a decade ago: No one had heard of them; They couldn’t raise the money to self-publish. But last year, after winning a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council and a successful crowdfunding campaign, the two decided to take matters into their own hands.

Barryn and Fawundu plan for the compilation to be the first in a series of biannual photographic journals, culled from a list of over 100 black female photographers …

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