Inside a beauty parlor in a small Florida town, Carrie is having her hair done. She is oblivious to the commotion around her. Peering intently into a mirror, she is at that quintessential moment of beautification when she must decide if the image she sees pleases her and she is ready to face the world.
Deborah Willis captured that moment in Eatonville, a small, predominantly African-American town outside of Orlando. But you could argue that she first encountered that moment — many times over — as a child at her mother’s Philadelphia beauty shop.
That candid portrait is part of “Framing Beauty,” Ms. Willis’s exhibition at the International Visions Gallery in Washington (on view through April 13), which explores how present-day African-Americans construct their identity and image. But the storied artifacts, subjects and communities depicted in these photographs imbue them with both a sense of history and continuity with the past.
The subjects of “Framing Beauty” are the students and beneficiaries of a long history of African-American vigilance and activism — a poignant insight revealed in Ms. Willis’s photograph of Carrie. In Eatonville, a town known for its legacy of autonomy, Carrie grasps — and controls — the mirror that reflects her determined and attractive face, a metaphor of the personal ways African-Americans have constructed their image in order to empower themselves.
The photograph, one of five beauty parlor images in “Framing Beauty,” reminds us of the powerful role of the beauty industry in African-American history and culture. As the historian Tiffany M. Gill points out in her book “Beauty Shop Politics,” these businesses spurred not only black entrepreneurship in the Jim Crow era but also political activism. Motivated by such organizations as the National Negro Business League, African-American women in search of economic independence created vibrant communal spaces where women supported each other in the service of social and cultural change.
That historical allusions abound in Ms. Willis’s exhibition is not surprising. In addition to her photographic work, she is a widely known historian and curator of African-American photography. Influenced by her father, an amateur photographer, and her cousin, the proprietor of a photo studio, she was inspired to become an artist after reading a library copy of Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” in the early 1960s.
It was the first time Ms. Willis, 65, had seen a book with photographs of black people, which changed her life. She pursued her formal studies at the Philadelphia College of Art in the mid-1970s, later receiving an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute and a Ph.D. in cultural studies from George Mason University.
“Framing Beauty” is informed by Ms. Willis’s scholarship. Not just about the way contemporary African-Americans shape their self-image, the work ultimately reminds of the historic ways photography allowed a people to countermand the negative image of themselves in the culture at large. The exhibition helps us to understand, as Ms. Willis observes, the extent to which the medium allowed a people, even in times of abject oppression, to “experiment with varied ideas of themselves and ultimately to honor how they saw themselves and wished to be seen by others.”
Eatonville, one of a number of locations represented in “Framing Beauty,” provided Ms. Willis with a perfect environment to explore the rich connection between past and present notions of African-American identity and self-presentation.
Eatonville was one of the first black towns to incorporate after the Civil War. It soon became a Southern mecca for African-American culture and the arts, popularized in the 1920s and 1930s by Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up there and became the pre-eminent female writer of the Harlem Renaissance and the inspiration for Ms. Willis’s “Embracing Eatonville.”
By the 1930s, Eatonville emerged as a model of black self-sufficiency, despite its continuing struggles with poverty, illiteracy and the hostility of the segregated world around it. Questioning the idea of integration — the enduring liberal answer to segregation — the town embraced a separatism that allowed its inhabitants to go about their lives and shape their self-images in an atmosphere less burdened by interracial tension.
As Hurston herself observed about the empowerment she felt growing up in Eatonville, it was not until she was sent to school in Jacksonville, Fla., at the age of 13, that she would see herself as different and marginal: “I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown,” an anxious and tentative image of herself conditioned by the veil of apprehension and derision that enshrouded her in the outside world.
The mood of the Eatonville photographs, like that of the exhibition in general, is largely one of quiet dignity — of a people unself-consciously celebrating their beauty and naming their style, to paraphrase Ms. Willis. Their subjects engage in updated versions of self-construction, following in the footsteps of ancestors who liberated “themselves from the legacy of caricatures that sought to define them throughout most of Western visual history.”
This theme resonates in Ms. Willis’s photographs: a serene and elegant Madonna and child transgressing the racial limitations and blind spots of art history; a mural on the side of a Harlem church, its heavenly imagery depicting the passage from the earthly to the sacred in the form of parishioners, dressed in their Sunday best, walking into the building below; bodybuilders, their physique obsessively sculptured, engaging in public displays of authority and prowess; and a majestic elder, her cane braced in one hand like a scepter, being tended to in an Eatonville beauty parlor.
In the end, as Ms. Willis’s scholarship has confirmed, the photograph has historically served as a powerful mirror in the African-American community, reflecting the achievements, triumphs and positive imagery all too often erased from the culture at large. Her compelling photographs bring this story up to date, ever mindful of the previous generations who emerged from the shadow of whiteness, in their own image, self-possessed and beautiful.
Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.” Mr. Berger has worked with Ms. Willis on several exhibitions and publications, including a show curated by Mr. Berger, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.” (Ms. Willis was a senior consultant.) More recently, they each contributed essays to “Gordon Parks: Collected Works” (Steidl, 2013).
Follow @drdebwillis, @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.