How Coreen Simpson blends fashion and social photography

The photographs in Colin Simpson’s new monograph are almost exclusively frontal. Whether photographing on the street, in the studio, in a club or at home, the people she photographs almost never turn away. One of the outstanding portraits from her early work is titled Cooking is My Game (Female Chef), Velma Jones (1977) – Shows an affable woman wearing a pair of spectacles looking back at the photographer. She was photographed in the kitchen of New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel, but the background was cropped to favor the female figure, filling the entire frame with her except for the presence of another chef. The woman in the apron raises her face in a confident, casual pose. church ladyThe same energetic gaze can be seen in photos taken in Zambia in 1986. A woman with her arms raised and a huge smile on her face expresses a contagious ecstasy, and it doesn’t matter even if much of the photo is dark or her fellow admirers look less dramatic. These images show that Simpson’s gaze fulfilled the long-standing goal of social photography – to lift the camera in front of people and let them show their best side, no matter where they were.

Simpson, born in Brooklyn in 1942, is known for his blend of fashion and society photography genres. Her new monograph of the same name, now published as part of Aperture’s Vision and Justice series, is an extensive retrospective of 50 years of Simpson’s work, marked by her early ventures in street photography and later experiments with collage. Yet there’s no neat way to distinguish her recurring attraction to “self-fashioning,” a phrase in the title of an essay in the book by art historian Bridget R. Cooks. In every part of the portrait—whether it’s a studio portrait shot in Harlem or a shot of runway models, then-fledgling hip-hop stars, and other celebrities and artists—the captivating moments are the message. From her expressive 1970s “YMCA bodybuilder” portraits to photos of Lorraine O’Grady with her arms raised in an elated, expressive moment, a conceptual line of elegant energy can be drawn.

Beyond Simpson’s appeal for style and urbaneness, what’s instructive is how the book captures a project that might otherwise have been lost in the history of photography. The 83-year-old Simpson’s first monograph is a unique record of the worldly pleasures of American, especially black, life. She photographed celebrities such as Muhammad Ali, Toni Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Oprah Winfrey, Coretta Scott King, and others, but in the series “Nightbirds/Nightlife” she also captured images of poised, anonymous individuals from the 1970s and 1980s: a “Marilyn Monroe impersonator” holding up her gown to reveal her hairy legs, a couple in a tight embrace who seemed to be collapsing in an orgy. Admirably, she sees no difference between the less well-known and the instantly recognisable. So why haven’t these vibrant photos of life reached a wider audience until now?

In an interview last year new york timesSimpson describes herself as an “underexposed photographer” and notes that she “wanted a serious book about my work because I deserved it.” This seriousness is also evident in the restorative work the editors (Dr. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Redford, and Deborah Willis) performed in unearthing and sorting her photographs. Yet we can only speculate as to why it took so long. Could it be that her parallel and successful career as a jewelry designer (her jewelry has been worn by celebrities such as Celia Cruz) eclipsed her photographic pursuits and removed her need for financial recognition as an artist? One gets the sense that she was in no rush to show off her photographs, although she enjoyed the camaraderie of some of the great masters of black photography, including James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks (whom she posed with at the exhibition opening) and Carrie Mea Weems (who was also a student in the Studio Museum’s darkroom class).

She also claims to be committed to independence. As she said in a conversation with Deborah Willis in her monograph, her lifelong pursuit was the freedom to do what she wanted. “I haven’t worked for anyone in many, many years,” she says proudly.

The photos capture a free-spirited spirit. Her ability to capture an “imperial quality,” as she described it to Willis, across decades and classes, was worthy of the acclaim she ultimately received. Her attunement to fashion and casual excellence may be attributed to her recurring childhood memory of sitting on a porch in Brooklyn and noticing a man in an orange suit walking by. Her tendency to capture him strutting made her realize the value of photographs. But she didn’t grow up looking at pictures of herself, or seeing pictures of her biological parents, from whom she was separated as a child and raised in a foster home. If her work points to “representational justice,” as the editors argue, it can be understood as beginning with a need for personal history—these images of fashionable people, strangers, and loved ones, viewed as an infinite family album.