Can Photography

Change the World? 

Support

“Through A Lens Darkly”

and find out!

The “Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People” feature-length PBS documentary and multimedia community engagement campaign seeks your support.  Your Tax Deductible Contribution will ensure that the story of  how African Americans have used the camera as a tool for social change from the invention of photography in the 1840s to the present will be shared across the nation and around the world.

Photographers, Scholars, Artists, Cultural Critics, Arts Advocates have joined me and my team to unearth and share the diverse stories of African American Life, Culture, and History as told through the Photograph. “Through A Lens Darkly” (TALD) is a collective journey that begins with invoking the memories found in the images contained in our extended Black family’s hidden photographic archive, while trying to reconcile the shame of a history that our forebears would rather forget.

In Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce wrote, “history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”  I created “Through A Lens Darkly” (TALD) because I wanted to try and ‘wake’ from the nightmare of a history in which African Americans have been so badly distorted and misrepresented that our nation still suffers profoundly from its legacy.  It is difficult for people who are not Black to imagine what it’s like to grow up seeing images of yourself in popular culture that frame your identity as something foreign to how you see yourself. Yet those stereotypes – lazy, shiftless, violent, ignorant, unattractive – have become so ingrained in our visual culture that they still play a significant role in defining how most of the world sees African Americans.  This has been our past – but need not be our destiny.

You Can Make Change Happen!

Help us to empower ourselves for the future

by revealing the truth of our pasts.

JOIN US as we complete the final phase of Post Production for the “Through A Lens Darkly” (TALD) Documentary and Transmedia project. Please Watch our Trailer and consider supporting the completion of “Through A Lens Darkly” with a tax deductible donation through the USA projects website and spread the word about our campaign.