Deana Lawson.

First Edition, Second Printing.

Deana Lawson is one of the most compelling artists of her generation. Lawson's photography invites comparison to the masterworks of Diane Arbus, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems. Over the last decade, Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities, through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, she works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. Throughout her work, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful.

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the celebrated novelist and critic Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation between Lawson and the artist Arthur Jafa. As Smith writes in her moving introductory essay, “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Read the essay by Zadie Smith in the New Yorker

Reviewed on photo-eye Blog by Blake Andrews