First edition, first impression of Manifest – Thirteen Colonies by Wendel A. White. Medium format hardback in new condition.
About
Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is the culmination of a multiyear journey by photographer Wendel A. White to find and document African American material culture in the libraries, museums, and archives of the thirteen original English colonies and Washington, DC. This personal reliquary of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections includes both singular objects connected to significant figures (a lock of Frederick Douglasss hair, Malcolm Xs tape recorder) and more quotidian materials (a hair straightening comb, a pressed corsage). Given the same photographic treatmenteach object centered on a stark black background and captured with a shallow depth of fieldthe distinction between the significant and the quotidian dissolves, as White makes it clear they are all important pieces of forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States.
