Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A New York Review of Books Best of 2020 Selection
A New York Times Best Art Book of the Year
An Art Newspaper Book of the Year

A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America's prison system.

More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America's prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them.

Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author's own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions--including solitary confinement--these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art.

As the movement to transform the country's criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century.

Troubling Vision addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness?

Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles Teenie Harris to the excess flesh performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.

Troubling Vision is a path-breaking book that examines the problem of seeing blackness--the simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility of African Americans--in US visual culture in the last half century. Weaving together critical modes and methodologies from performance studies, art history, critical race studies, visual culture analysis, and gender theory, Fleetwood expands Du Bois's idea of double vision into a broad questioning of whether 'representation itself will resolve the problem of the black body in the field of vision.' With skilled attention to historical contexts, documentary practices, and media forms, she takes up the works of a broad variety of cultural producers, from photographers and playwrights to musicians and visual artists and examines black spectatorship as well as black spectacle. In chapters on the trope of 'non-iconicity' in the photographs of Charles (Teenie) Harris, the 'visible seams' in the digital images of the artist Fatimah Tuggar, and a coda on the un-dead Michael Jackson, Fleetwood's close analyses soar. Troubling Vision is a beautifully written, original, and important addition to the field of American Studies.--Announcement of the American Studies Association for the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize

Nicole R. Fleetwood's answers to these questions will change the way you think about the next photograph that you see depicting a racial event, black celebrity, or public figure. In On Racial Icons, Fleetwood focuses a sustained look on photography in documenting black public life, exploring the ways in which iconic images function as celebrations of national and racial progress at times or as a gauge of collective racial wounds in moments of crisis.

Offering an overview of photography's ability to capture shifting race relations, Fleetwood spotlights in each chapter a different set of iconic images in key sectors of public life. She considers flash points of racialized violence in photographs of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till; the political, aesthetic, and cultural shifts marked by the rise of pop stars such as Diana Ross; and the power and precarity of such black sports icons as Serena Williams and LeBron James; and she does not miss Barack Obama and his family along the way. On Racial Icons is an eye-opener in every sense of the phrase.
Images from the book. (http: //rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/pages/Fleetwood.aspx)

Troubling Vision addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness?

Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles Teenie Harris to the excess flesh performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.

Troubling Vision is a path-breaking book that examines the problem of seeing blackness--the simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility of African Americans--in US visual culture in the last half century. Weaving together critical modes and methodologies from performance studies, art history, critical race studies, visual culture analysis, and gender theory, Fleetwood expands Du Bois's idea of double vision into a broad questioning of whether 'representation itself will resolve the problem of the black body in the field of vision.' With skilled attention to historical contexts, documentary practices, and media forms, she takes up the works of a broad variety of cultural producers, from photographers and playwrights to musicians and visual artists and examines black spectatorship as well as black spectacle. In chapters on the trope of 'non-iconicity' in the photographs of Charles (Teenie) Harris, the 'visible seams' in the digital images of the artist Fatimah Tuggar, and a coda on the un-dead Michael Jackson, Fleetwood's close analyses soar. Troubling Vision is a beautifully written, original, and important addition to the field of American Studies.--Announcement of the American Studies Association for the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize

Kinship and Community: Highlights from the Texas African American Photography Archive celebrates the rich history of photography created by and for Black communities in Texas.

From eighteenth-century ambrotype portraits by unidentified photographers to the work of self-employed photographers serving segregated towns and neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century, a rich body of photography was created by and for Black communities in Texas. The Texas African American Photography Archive (TAAP), founded in 1995 by Alan Govenar and Kaleta Doolin, contains more than sixty thousand negatives and prints from this history. Kinship and Community distills the archive's remarkable photographs into a moving testament to the medium and its transformative power. Filled with joy and pride, the images in this volume portray exemplary individuals and groups while documenting the parades, church services, graduations, and sporting events that punctuated everyday life. These positive depictions of Black life, by countering the mainstream media's racist stereotypes, played a quiet but powerful role in the struggle for civil rights.

Today, community photography provides a model for collaborative image-making, its vitality stemming from this union of ethics and aesthetics. Many of the photographers featured in Kinship and Community learned their trade in the military or from other Black photographers. As the civil rights era progressed, their aptitude and artistry enabled them to develop an affirmative vision for African American communities in a deeply segregated state. Decades later, the time has come to celebrate the accomplishments of these talented photographers, who include A. B. Bell, Marion Butts, Rodney Evans, Elnora Frazier, Alonzo Jordan, Benny Joseph, and Eugene Roquemore.

Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.