Coreen Simpson: A Monograph – The Brooklyn Rail

Coreen Simpson: A Monograph
Edited by Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis
Aperture, 2025

The first picture Coreen Simpson ever took was a mental one. The New York-born photographer was a Brooklyn stoop kid in the 1940s and ’50s who recalls sitting on the steps while her foster mother combed her hair and she pressed ‘click’ in her mind to bank the visual feast of Black fashion that crossed her eyeline; glamorous women, Black Dandies in orange suits and alligator shoes. Later, she would graduate from mentally logging these images to formally logging them across five decades of photographic work. Coreen Simpson: A Monograph—the second book in the Aperture’s Vision & Justice Book Series edited by Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis—is the first monograph for the photographer, now in her eighties. Over 179 images spanning her studio photography, street and fashion photography, and mixed-media collages illuminate Simpson’s gaze. The volume reveals a signature visual language that uses the manifold articulations of Black style—across sports, youth, street, and fashion culture—to showcase the radiance and infinite textures of Black life.

Simpson’s interest in photography began out of frustration. In the 1970s, she was an enterprising freelance lifestyle writer for the magazine Unique NY. She continually found herself unhappy with the images selected to accompany her work. She felt that images guided people’s eyes in magazines, so proper image and text pairing would not only elevate a piece, but also allow readers to see the world the right way: through her eyes. The monograph’s editors, in a joint opening note, remark that Simpson photographed all of her subjects with “an affirming gaze.” Simpson cites James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, and Richard Avedon as professional influences. “He made people look important,” she recalls of Avedon’s social photography in the monograph. This became a guiding principle of her own photographic practice as seen in early career subjects; B-boys, clubgoers (at Cotton Club, Area, The Fun House), old-timers strutting around Harlem, bodybuilders, an all-male drag ballet company, a street preacher, a chef highlighted in a feature on Black hospitality workers. Simpson made Black people of all walks of life look important. Her work, which consisted primarily of close-up portraiture or wide shots cropped to draw focus onto single subjects, is devoted not just to taking pictures of Black people, but to teaching us how to look at Black people, especially Black women.

In her “Church Ladies” series included in the book, she documented the fashions of Black churchgoing women from Harlem, New York to Zambia, Africa beginning in the 1970s through the 1990s. The photographs are all high contrast black-and-white images. In one, a woman dressed in matching white skirt, shoes, bag, and voluminous church hat stands in front of a Harlem dress shop that abuts a church. Behind her, Sunday service attendees can be seen rubbernecking. An ordinary moment is constructed to look like a fashion editorial, with an emphasis on the woman’s direct eye contact and delicate stance, to cropped framing that makes nearby cars and buildings feel like props.