To hear Maurice Berger tell it, growing up among mostly Black and Puerto Rican families in a low-income housing project in New York City sharpened his lens on the layers and levels of discrimination in America. “As a gay man and as a Jew, I’ve experienced homophobia and antisemitism in my life,” he writes in RACE STORIES: Essays on the Power of Images (Aperture/The New York Times, $40). “But the racism the kids I grew up with experienced, in front of my eyes, left me realizing that nothing quite compared to that in terms of prejudice.”
With elegant logic and crystalline prose, the acclaimed curator and cultural historian, who died in 2020, invites us to see through that lens the “troubling reality” of racism, as well as the power of images to “undermine the very concept of difference.”
The essays and images in this anthology — edited by Berger’s husband, the scholar Marvin Heiferman, and with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. — first appeared in this newspaper between 2012 and 2019. In an afterword the artist Dawoud Bey pays tribute to Berger’s public repudiation of racism in the art world: “Maurice was the annoying pebble inside the polished shoes of the privileged that we all so needed.”
The accompanying photographs zip from the civil rights to the Black Lives Matter movements, with iconic works by the likes of Gordon Parks and Carrie Mae Weems as well as some small surprises, like Nandita Raman’s homage to Indian cinema houses and Al Smith’s images of the Seattle jazz scene in the 1940s.
Berger also championed contemporary artists like LaToya Ruby Frazier and Nona Faustine early in their careers. His 2016 essay “Black Dandies, Style Rebels With a Cause” presages the theme of next spring’s Met Gala in just one of many examples of the continued relevance, even prescience, of his work in the growing canon of criticism on Black visual culture.
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