'Looking for Beauty' at AAMP, in others and in yourself

When Deborah Willis is behind a camera, she isn’t just capturing stunning images of black art, culture, and histories. Her photography refocuses the lens on the viewer and demands that they search for the beauty in others and within themselves. This is the essence of her current exhibition, Went Looking for Beauty: Refashioning Self, running through April 29 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP).

Willis is chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, including visual culture, the photographic history of slavery and emancipation, and contemporary women photographers and beauty. Willis received her BFA in photography in Philadelphia, went on to pursue two master’s degrees (one in photography and art history, one in museum studies), and earned her PhD in cultural studies from George Mason University.

In this collection of photographs, Willis journeys through her archives to highlight her ongoing pursuit of beauty, uncovered within the communities she joins. From beauty shops in North Philadelphia and Eatonville, Florida, to a public baptism on the streets of Harlem and a self-portrait of her pregnant body, Willis sees beauty as the framework to tell stories of the black community as well as her own.

“I think beauty is something that is inherent,” Willis said during a recent talk at the museum. “I think it’s what we do. If you have a good heart, that is beautiful. . . . Beauty is the essence that you feel.”

Beauty shops, baptisms, and blackamoors

As a child, beauty was a central part of Willis’s life. She saw beauty in the photographs her father took of family holidays and vacations, but especially in the images he took in her mother’s North Philadelphia beauty shop. The shop served as a creative space — a place for exchanging stories, singing songs, and finding an intimate community.

“The beauty shop was about transforming our lives and telling stories,” she shared. “I used to listen. I didn’t know what I was listening to, but it stayed with me and nourished me.”

The exhibition layers these energetic photographs of women in the beauty shop talking, laughing, reading magazines, and sitting under the dryer. It’s easy for viewers to insert themselves in these images, recalling their own experiences of going to the salon or barbershop to beautify themselves.

However, some of the exhibition's most striking images portray how beauty is preserved, particularly during a baptism on the streets of Harlem. In these photographs, women dressed in white, their hair placed securely in shower caps, go forward one by one to be baptized by a firehose.

Through this series, Willis comments on the ways women of color keep their beauty safe in the midst of a sacred exercise. But what is also interesting about this display, Willis said, was how the community reclaims the negative association of the firehose — an object that harmed black bodies during the civil rights movement — as a tool to celebrate a spiritual transition.

Willis fills the exhibition with commentary about how the black community reclaims beauty through objects with painful histories, as in photos she incorporates of blackamoors, popular figurines during the Italian Renaissance that were objects of both scorn and beauty.

‘Anyone can see that beauty’

Went Looking for Beauty, at its core, is a deeply personal archival exhibition that provides Willis the space to comment on the beauty she sees in the world around her as well as how she sees herself. Her self-portrait I Made Space for a Good Man, which she created with her son, conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, celebrates her role as a creative and a mother.

“These images don’t just tell Dr. Willis’s story but our story, and really reflect the people that are looking at the pieces,” AAMP director of curatorial services Dejay Duckett says. “It causes people to really think about what is beautiful to them and connect to the photographs and all they represent. It’s beautiful. Anyone can see that beauty.”

Deborah Willis’s Went Looking for Beauty: Refashioning Self is on display at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (701 Arch Street) through Sunday, April 29. For tickets and more information, call 215-574-0380 or visit online.

Above: Photography by Deborah Willis, courtesy of AAMP.