Maurice Berger Saw Visual Literacy as a Means Toward Racial Literacy

For 10 years, the critic and educator Maurice Berger wrote a column for the New York Times titled “Race Stories.” Writing about photographs, he wanted to teach visual literacy, and then “racial literacy through visual literacy.” The column championed the work of photographers, like Jamel Shabazz, Zanele Muholi, Carrie Mae Weems, Nona Faustine, and Gordon Parks, whose projects—whether of social documentary or artistic exploration—impressed Berger.

This month, a collection of nearly 70 of those short essays is being published by Aperture, in collaboration with the New York Times, the first in a “Vision and Justice” series of books edited by Sarah Lewis, Deborah Willis, and Leigh Raiford. Berger, who died of Covid in the early days of the pandemic, liked to “write about photographers who tell big stories—not just about the conflagrations… but about what happens every single day in the lives of others,” as he put it in 2018. Edited by Marvin Heiferman, a writer, curator, and Berger’s widow, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images is thoughtfully arranged in five sections based on themes woven from Berger’s ideological threads: revisiting images, visibility, history and memory, witnessing, and community.

Zun Lee: Bedtime shenanigans with Carlos Richardson and his daughter Selah, 2012. From Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, 2024.

Berger’s multiyear column possesses a sustained inner chutzpah that will be especially noticeable to anyone who has written professionally and consistently about art for any significant length of time. The dizzying amount of press releases, constraints of word count, the need to balance personal and house styles: a minimum trifecta of considerations that he would have had to deal with, month after month. He remained on message with obvious dedication; it must have helped that there was always material to work with.

In almost every essay, Berger examines the photographers and their work in adulatory fashion. This is notable. Could this have been because his “greatest passion is to be an educator,” as he says in the foreword? It would have been odd if he were to criticize the work of Black or Indian or Chicana or Japanese photographers, while asking white readers to empathize with their perspectives. But praise is not the absence of conscientiousness, which Berger excelled in. One should only consider how he wrote about figures or images likely familiar to his readers—Joane Wilson in front of a “colored entrance” sign, Malcolm X reading a newspaper, Martin Luther King Jr. in a conversation with his daughter, Brittany Bree Newsome removing a Confederate flag—then re-examined those momentous pictures, carefully assembling cultural and historical data. In “The Faces of Bigotry,” for instance, he draws parallels between Samuel Corum’s 2017 photograph of Peter Cvjetanovic, marching alongside others at a counterprotest led by neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, and the Alt-Right at the University of Virginia; and the 1957 image by Will Counts of students shouting insults at Elizabeth Eckford as she attempts to integrate a high school in Arkansas.

Deborah Willis: Carrie in EuroSalon, Eaton, Florida, 2004. From Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, 2024.

He did not spare chastisement, however, when writing about Dana Schutz’s painterly interpretation of Emmett Till’s open casket, which reads, says Berger, “like it was made in a historical and cultural vacuum,” and felt like “another violation” of the teenager’s body. His interest in Schutz’s cross-cultural work—and indeed in other white photographers whose images he wrote about, like Lee Friedlander and Florence Mars —is notable for what it says about how he viewed himself as a Jewish American writing mostly about Black photographers. “Cross-cultural work demands insight, respect, sensitivity, and rigor. It also requires honesty about and self-inquiry into one’s own racial attitudes,” he wrote in that 2017 essay about Till’s image.

I speak about Berger’s identity because his writing examined race and its visualizing in photography. His essays, taken as an oeuvre, make two key propositions: first, to write is to plumb the inner reserves of empathy, to uncover what you think or feel about those whose experience you need to understand. Second, writing on photography can help in particular because the writer is necessarily a respondent—a secondary figure rather than primary witness—thinking through what others have pictured, seeing others through the ways they see themselves.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005. From Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, 2024.

That second idea is implied in Berger’s fidelity to photography. In a historical sense it is a medium that cannot escape its unsavory credentials, having been used to shape imperial or stereotypical narratives about the non-white subject. And yet, Berger’s investment was to account for those who work against the medium’s inherited baggage. Quoting Anthony Barboza in the book’s final essay on Kamoinge, the African American photography collective, Berger leaves us with a resonant notion: that photographers “absorb the feelings of the self and the world and reflect back what we see.”