Coreen Simpson: A Monograph: Vision & Justice

(Hardback)

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The second title in Aperture's Vision & Justice Series,Coreen Simpson's first major publication is a long-overdue celebration and introduction to a singular, creative force who interweaves photography, design, and explorations of identity.

Coreen Simpson has done it all, from photography, to writing, to jewelry design. Before turning to photography, she pursued a career as a freelance writer, working for magazines such as Essence and Unique New York, from the early 1980s onward. Dissatisfied with the work of the photographers assigned to illustrate her stories, she decided to learn how to make her own, taking lessons in darkroom processing at the Studio Museum in Harlem and studying with jazz photographer Frank Stewart. Similarly, as a jewelry designer, when Simpson discovered that she couldn't find a cameo of a woman of color, she designed her signature Black Cameo, which has since been worn by everyone from Rosa Parks to Iman.

For more than five decades, Simpson's wide-ranging photographic work has covered fashion, local political figures, and the New York art world, including Just Above Midtown gallery, an essential space for Black artists. Among the work featured in Coreen Simpson: Monograph is the artist's celebrated B-Boys series, begun in the 1980s. These portraits of young people at the Roxy club coming of age within the early years of hip-hop characteristically explore the subjects' poise and self-possession and how they expressed themselves through dress. As Deborah Willis writes, "all of Simpson's portraits stress pride and dignity." This book, the artist's first major publication, offers a long-overdue celebration and introduction to Simpson's story as singular, creative force who interweaves photography, design, and explorations of identity.

Author Bio

Coreen Simpson (born in New York, 1942) is a celebrated photographer and jewelry designer from Brooklyn, whose career has spanned more than five decades. Her work has been featured in Essence, the New York Times, Village Voice, and Vogue, among other publications. Her photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bronx Museum; Le Muse de la Photographie, Belgium; and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, among others. Dr. Sarah E. Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University and the founder of Vision & Justice. She is an award-winning art and cultural historian whose books and edited volumes include The Rise (2014), the "Vision & Justice" issue of Aperture magazine (2016), Carrie Mae Weems (2021), The Unseen Truth (2024), and Vision & Justice (2025). Deborah Willisis an author and curator whose pioneering research focuses on cultural histories, the Black body, women, and gender. She is a celebrated photographer, acclaimed historian of photography, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, and university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Willis is also a coeditor of the Vision and Justice Book Series. Bridget R. Cooks is professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She is author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011) and her writing can be found in dozens of art exhibition catalogs and academic publications such as Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly. Awol Erizkus multimedia work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gagosian, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Ben Brown Gallery, Hong Kong; Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Aperture published his first major monograph, Mystic Parallax, in 2023. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she is cocurator of the exhibition Amy Sherald: American Sublime (2025). Previously, as assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, she contributed to the exhibitions LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital and Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic. Valerie Cassel Oliver is senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Prior to her tenure at CAMH, she was director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. Doreen St. Flix is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She is a winner of a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is an Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He is the founder of the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom. He most recently curated the exhibition Almost Unknown: Afric-American Picture Gallery at the Winterthur Museum, and Library, Delaware. Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, writer, and feminist activist. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers UniversityNewark, where she also directs the New Arts Justice Initiative. Deborah Willis is an author and curator whose pioneering research focuses on cultural histories, the Black body, women, and gender. She is a celebrated photographer, acclaimed historian of photography, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, and university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Willis is also a coeditor of the Vision and Justice Book Series.