Book Review
Her photography captures both celebrities and everyday people with such intimacy that they might call to mind your neighbors and friends.
Coreen Simpson, “Jamien” (1982) from the series B-Boys, from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph (Aperture, 2025) (all images courtesy the artist)
You might already recognize the figures in Coreen Simpson’s photographs. Yes, they are influential and famous: Winnie Mandela, Eartha Kitt, and Toni Morrison, to name a few. But some of her other images — her studio portraits and street candids — are familiar in a different way. Simpson’s lens captures them with such intimacy that they might call to mind your neighbors, childhood pastor, or play cousins.
Her career archives decades of Black culture, imparting equal esteem to churchwomen adorned in their Sunday best and high-fashion runways or glitzy premieres. “Every aspect of her electrifying practice is a celebration of Black self-fashioning,” write Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the editors of a new book honoring Simpson’s career since the 1970s. Released on October 14, Coreen Simpson: A Monograph is the second edition in Aperture’s Vision & Justice series. It features rich essays that ruminate on her place in shaping and solidifying Black stylistic history. Bridget R. Cooks traverses her artistic biography in “Fashioning the Self,” while Valerie Cassel Oliver writes beautifully about Simpson’s surrealism in the essay “Pictorial Fabulations.”
Coreen Simpson, “Gail Pilgrim Wearing a Black Cameo Collection Crown by Coreen Simpson” (1990s), from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph
Simpson was also a prolific jewelry designer, best known for creating the Black Cameo, an afrocentric interpretation of the classic jewelry trope. The project was eventually licensed by Avon and could be seen on celebrities and everyday women alike. Its popularity helped propel her photographic career and finance equipment. In an interview with the artist included in the monograph, Willis compared the cameos to public monuments for their philosophical weight and ubiquity. Yet, in spite of Simpson’s successful career in fashion and eminence in the Black arts scene, Aperture’s monograph is the first to celebrate her.
The book begins with a 1980 image of a stylish Black woman walking underneath a mural brandishing the phrase “THINK POSITIVE”: a striking encapsulation of Simpson’s images’ ethos of positive representation. The woman’s afro and fur-trimmed leather coat situate her in the sleek cool of the decade. The section, which addresses her early work, cycles through her photographs of the mundane and the accidentally surreal: oiled bodybuilders, a little boy blowing a bugle sheathed in the American flag, glamorous folks adorned with fabulous capes and feathers. Her pictures are emblematic of fashion trends and politics; you can traverse eras of nightlife and culture in the book’s pages.
Coreen Simpson, “Think Positive” (Harlem, 1980), from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph
Her later images follow a tradition of diasporic portraiture, recalling the stately snapshots of Malian nightlife by Malick Sidibé or Seydou Keïta’s stylish studio portraits, as well as the fashion-forward documentations of 20th-century Harlem by James Van Der Zee. Simpson photographed Harlem residents at an ad hoc studio in the back of a candy store, and in 1982, set up camp at The Roxy to begin documenting the rising subculture of New York City’s B-Boys. “I wanted to photograph them as if they were somebody important,” she said. They appear donning full regalia: futuristic shades, Cuban links, leather gloves, hats teetering at impossible inclines, bamboo earrings, and fly winter coats. In their extravagant innovation, you can see the seeds of contemporary streetwear trends planted.
“Her portraits possess a distinct quality, a tension between intimacy and grandeur,” writes photographer Awol Erizku in “The Aesthetics of Defiance,” an essay on Simpson’s foray into hip-hop documentation. “It’s this rare ability to disarm her subjects, even the toughest among them, that makes her work so extraordinary.”
Coreen Simpson, “Self-portrait” (New York, 1970s), from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph
The B-Boys series section transitions into the effortless cool of her Nitebirds/Nightlife series, marked by heavy flash. Drag queens and dancers don fluffy boas, sequins, and three-piece suits. The images pulse with life, capturing the vibrance of after-hours functions from 1978 into the ’90s. In her immortalization of musical icons like Grace Jones and Diana Ross, of the Cotton Club and Les Ballets Trocadero, we can find hints of contemporary Black, queer New York: the pulsing dance floors and celebrations of Bodyhack, Papi Juice, or Gush.
Art making, from literature to painting to photography, can be deployed as a tool for self-determination. Simpson’s fastidious depictions of decades reflect back to us the realities of our contemporary moment. Her tender lens calls to mind traditions of Black artistic and cultural innovation and style across the diaspora and generations. Simpson’s predilection for beauty began as a child in Brooklyn, watching polished women and well-dressed dandies pass by her porch while her foster mother styled her hair. Later in life, her camera and jewelry became a means to show her community care and love. In her interview with Simpson, Deborah Willis emphasizes the value and dignity of constructing one’s own image, “from slavery to the present,” stating, “You remind the world about Black beauty, and what it means to walk out of the house feeling that you’ve fashioned yourself.
Coreen Simpson, “Ntozake Shange” (1997/2021) from the series Aboutface, from Coreen Simpson: A MonographCoreen Simpson, “Grace Jones” (1980s) from the series Nitebirds/Nightlife, from Coreen Simpson: A Monograph
Coreen Simpson: A Monograph (2025), edited by Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, is published by Aperture and available online and from independent booksellers.
