The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) has launched a Race Stories page on their website featuring the monthly essays on race and photography written by CADVC research professor and chief curator, Dr. Maurice Berger, for the New York Times. His monthly column for the Lens Blog of the paper—Race Stories—consists of well-researched essays that are written in a literary and reader-friendly style. Since the series began in July 2012, it has reached hundreds of thousands of readers. In it, Dr. Berger explores a range of subjects and photographers, predominantly work from the civil rights era to the present, focusing on the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, or social or regional issues around race not usually covered in the mainstream media.  

“My essays for the New York Times, which are an aspect of my work as a research professor at UMBC, advocate the teaching of racial literacy through images,” notes Dr. Berger. “They help us to see with fresh eyes one of the nation’s most daunting issues: race relations. The Race Stories page on the CADVC website will make this work more readily available to the UMBC and other academic communities.”

You can access Race Stories here:  http://cadvc.umbc.edu/racestories/

Image Credits:
Left: Associated News, Shirley Bassey Being Prepared for Performance, 1960
Center: Gordon Parks, Untitled, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation