Front cover of Coreen Simpson: A Monograph (Aperture, 2025); cover image: Coreen Simpson, Jamien, 1982, from the series ‟B-Boys.”
Courtesy the artist.
The photographs in Coreen Simpson’s new monograph are nearly all frontal shots. Whether taken on the street, in the studio, in clubs, or at home, those whom she has pictured scarcely turn away. One outstanding portrait among her early work—titled Cooking Is My Game (Lady Chef), Velma Jones (1977)—shows a genial woman holding a pair of eyeglasses and looking back at the photographer. She is pictured in the kitchen of the Hotel Roosevelt in New York City, but the backdrop is cropped in favor of the woman’s form, which fills the frame save for the presence of another chef. The aproned woman lifts her face in a confident pose of casual poise. Church Ladies, taken in Zambia in 1986, contains a similarly buoyant gaze. A woman raises her arms, her face lit in a broad smile, displaying a rapture so contagious it matters little if most parts of the picture are shadowy or if her fellow worshippers seem less showy. Simpson’s gaze, these images show, fulfills the long-held purpose of social photography—to hold a camera up to people while they put forward the best version of themselves, regardless of where they happen to be.
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Simpson, born in 1942 in Brooklyn, is best known for merging the genres of fashion and social photography. Her new eponymous monograph is now being published as part of Aperture’s Vision and Justice Book Series, and in it, Simpson’s five decades of work is broadly surveyed, bookmarked by her early adventures in street photography and her later experimentation with collage. There is, however, no neat way to compartmentalize her repeated attraction to the “fashioning of self,” to lift a line from the title of an essay in the book by the art historian Bridget R. Cooks. In each section of portraits—whether studio portraits taken in Harlem, or pictures of runway models, stars of the then-fledgling hip-hop scene, and other celebrities and artists—the glamorized moment is the message. A conceptual line of elegant exuberance can be drawn from her 1970s portrait of expressive “bodybuilders at the YMCA” to a photo of Lorraine O’Grady lifting her arms in a jubilant, performative instant.
Coreen Simpson, Cooking Is My Game (Lady Chef), Velma James, Hotel Roosevelt, New
York, 1977.
Courtesy the artist
What’s revelatory, besides Simpson’s attraction to the stylish and suave, is how the book captures a project that might have otherwise been lost to photographic history. At 83, Simpson’s first monograph is a peculiar documentation of the worldly pleasures of (especially Black) American life. She pictured the notable—Muhammad Ali, Toni Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Oprah Winfrey, Coretta Scott-King—but, also, in the series “Nitebirds/Nightlife,” photographs of self-possessed, unnamed individuals, taken in the 1970s and 1980s: a “Marilyn Monroe impersonator” who raises a gown to reveal hirsute legs, a couple in tight embrace who seem to keel over in their revel. There is, admirably, no sense of distinction between how she saw the lesser known and the instantly recognizable. Why, then, did these pictures of exuberant life fail to reach a wider audience, until now?
In an interview last year with the New York Times, which describes her as an “underexposed photographer,” Simpson notes that she “wanted a serious book on my work, because I deserve it.” The recuperative labor of the editors (Drs Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis) in unearthing and sequencing her pictures attend to this seriousness. Yet we can only speculate on why it took so long. Could it be that her parallel, successful career as a designer of jewelry—worn by such celebrities as Celia Cruz—eclipsed her photographic pursuits, and made her less needy of financial validation as an artist? One senses that she was in no great hurry to show her photographs—even if she enjoyed the camaraderie of certain greats of Black photography, including James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks (who she photographed together at an exhibition opening) and Carrie Mea Weems (who was also a student in her darkroom class at the Studio Museum).
Coreen Simpson: Ntozake Shange, 1997/2021, from the series ‟Aboutface.”
There’s also her self-proclaimed commitment to independence. Her lifelong quest, as she put it to Deborah Willis in a conversation in the monograph, is to be free to do what she wanted to do. “I haven’t worked for anybody in many, many years,” she said proudly.
The photographs reveal that free-spirited flair. Her ability to capture “regalness,” across decades and class, as she described her preoccupation to Willis, is worth the accretion of acclaim she’s finally getting. Her attunement to fashion and casual excellence perhaps owes to a recurring childhood memory she has of sitting on a stoop in Brooklyn and noticing a man walk past in an orange suit. She felt inclined to capture his swagger, which pointed her to the value of photographs. But she hadn’t grown up with photographs of herself, and neither had she seen photographs of her biological parents, whom she was separated from as a child, growing up in foster homes. If her work points to “representational justice,” as the editors argue, it could be read to have begun with the need for a personal history—these images of fashionable people, strangers and kin alike, seen as a boundless family album.
