What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life - by Fred Moten (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This powerful collection highlights the importance of snapshots in Black American life: as tools to challenge stereotypes, and as a way to document family and culture

Published with Art Gallery of Ontario.

Thoughtfully illustrated, this volume highlights a selection of photographs of African American family life between the 1970s and the early 2000s--pictures that were lost by their original owners and then found by the artist Zun Lee on a street in Detroit in 2012, marking the beginning of the Fade Resistance collection of more than 4,000 Polaroids. Lee describes the collection as an important record of Black visual self-representation and a means to "reflect the way Black people saw themselves on their terms--without the intention of being seen, or judged, by others." To Lee, these powerful photographs are an expression of "Black life mattering."
These vivid images chronicle milestones such as weddings, birthdays and graduations, as well as quiet daily moments, offering contemporary views long ignored or erased by mainstream culture. Together, these works highlight the role snapshots have played in Black life, as tools to challenge stereotypical portrayals and as a means to memorialize family, culture and heritage.
Topics such as self-representation, visual history and the social power of photographs are addressed in critical texts by Sophie Hackett, Stefano Harney, Zun Lee and Fred Moten, and an original contribution by celebrated poet Dawn Lundy Martin.

Review Quotes

Spot on: a cache of found Polaroids and prints from another era before digital photography that gives us a glimpse into Black life during that time.-- "AIGA"

By operating as art, artifact, and evidence, the images brought together in What Matters Most shatter deeply entrenched paradigms of false hierarchies long entrenched in the photography world where the snapshot is considered ephemera rather than fine art...within these familiar images where boundaries blur and fade away, exists a deeper truth: art belongs to the people.--Sara Rosen "Animal"