Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies

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 Douglass’s hair, Malcolm X’s tape recorder) and more quotidian materials (a hair straightening comb, a pressed corsage). Given the same photographic treatment—each object centered on a stark black background and captured with a shallow depth of field—the 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.

New essays by Cheryl Finley, Ilisa Barbash, and Leigh Raiford provide historical and sociological context for the objects in White’s images, while conversations with Deborah Willis and Brenda Dione Tindal delve into White’s personal history, his life as a photographer, and the bodies of work that led to Manifest | Thirteen Colonies.

Wendel A. White (b. 1956, Newark, NJ) is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University and has taught photography at the School of Visual Arts; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the International Center of Photography; and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work has received various awards and fellowships, including: Doctor of Arts (hc), Oakland University; Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography; Bunn Lectureship in Photography, Bradley University; three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; and New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; among many others.