Aperture is pleased to announce the publication of Deana Lawson's highly anticipated, landmark first book, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph.

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.”

Deana Lawson (born in Rochester, New York, 1979) is a photographic artist based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art; Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum; Underground Museum, Los Angeles; Studio Museum in Harlem; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Kunst Im Tunnel, Dusseldorf; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; Artists Space, New York; Print Center, Philadelphia; and Museum of Fine Art, Spelman College, Atlanta. Lawson is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, Art Matters grant, John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant, Aaron Siskind Foundation fellowship grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. Her work has been published in magazines, including Aperture, BOMB, the New Yorker, Time, and the California Sunday Magazine. Lawson is an assistant professor in visual arts at Princeton University.

Zadie Smith is the author of the acclaimed novels White Teeth (2001), The Autograph Man (2003), On Beauty (2005), NW (2013), and Swing Time (2016), and the essay collections Changing My Mind (2010) and Feel Free (2018). Winner of the Whitbread first novel award and the Guardian First Book Award, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and Harper's.

Arthur Jafa is a filmmaker and cinematographer whose work includes Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2017), Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2017), Sharifa Walks (2015), In the Morning (2014), Dreams Are Colder Than Death (2014), I Am Ali (2002), Rouch in Reverse (1995), and Daughters of the Dust (1991).

Read the essay by Zadie Smith in the New Yorker

Reviewed on photo-eye Blog by Blake Andrews