In the latest essay for his Race Stories column in The New York Times, Maurice Berger, research professor at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, shares his views on Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood, a new book by a Toronto-based photographer and physician, Zun Lee. While the book’s images of African-American fathers may at first seem ordinary — for example, a man feeding his baby as his other children play nearby — Berger notes that the photographs “are in one sense unusual: Their subjects are black and counter mainstream media that typically depict African-American fatherhood as a wasteland of dysfunction and irresponsibility.”
Read “Black Fathers, Present and Accountable” and view the photographs at The New York Times Lens blog.
Berger’s Race Stories column which appears monthly on The New York Times website, is “a continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race.”
