In grad school, at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, Williams continued photographing herself, and the work matured. One of my favorite images from that time, the haunting “Untitled (face in light),” evokes the image of Billie Holiday, calling the late singer forth like a glorious, glowing spectre. But, after school, Williams struggled to find a place in the professional art world. She was resistant to the idea of selling her prints. “I had this grandiose notion that art was about ideas and that ideas should be shared freely,” she said. She submitted work for shows and was routinely rejected. She recalls that when her photographs were accepted into one exhibit, the organizers lost certain pieces and damaged others. All the while, Williams was struggling to make ends meet. “I remember thinking, I’m not doing this,” she told me.
“Untitled (mask),” 1986-87.
“Untitled (split),” 1985-86.
In 2002, Williams co-authored the brilliant book “The Black Female Body: A Photographic History” with her friend, the curator and scholar Deborah Willis, who has spent her career making the archive of Black photography visible. (“Tender” is dedicated to her.) But Williams stopped making her own photographs officially in 2009. Her shop in New Orleans shuttered during the early days of the pandemic, after five years in business, and with her new downtime Williams started tending to her archive, scanning hundreds of prints and negatives of found photographs, family pictures, and pinup images, and sometimes sharing them on Instagram. A trio of self-portraits that she accidentally posted piqued the interest of the artist and photographer Paul Sepuya. He mentioned it to Paul Schiek, the founder of the photo-book imprint TBW Books, which ultimately put out “Tender.” Earlier this month, it won the prize for First PhotoBook at the 2023 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Awards.
