What Matters Most

This powerful collection highlights the importance of snapshots in Black American life: as tools to challenge stereotypes, and as a way to document family and culture.

Thoughtfully illustrated, this volume highlights a selection of photographs of African American family life between the 1970s and the early 2000s--pictures that were lost by their original owners and then found by the artist Zun Lee on a street in Detroit in 2012, marking the beginning of the Fade Resistance collection of more than 4,000 Polaroids. Lee describes the collection as an important record of Black visual self-representation and a means to "reflect the way Black people saw themselves on their terms--without the intention of being seen, or judged, by others." To Lee, these powerful photographs are an expression of Black life mattering.

These vivid images chronicle milestones such as weddings, birthdays and graduations, as well as quiet daily moments, offering contemporary views long ignored or erased by mainstream culture. Together, these works highlight the role snapshots have played in Black life, as tools to challenge stereotypical portrayals and as a means to memorialize family, culture and heritage.

Topics such as self-representation, visual history and the social power of photographs are addressed in critical texts by Sophie Hackett, Stefano Harney, Zun Lee and Fred Moten, and an original contribution by celebrated poet Dawn Lundy Martin.

Zun Lee is an award-winning visual artist, physician and educator. He was born and raised in Germany and has also lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago. He currently divides his time between Toronto, ON and Charlotte, NC.

Through lens-based storytelling, archival and socially engaged practice, Lee investigates Black everyday life and family spaces as sites of intimacy, belonging and insurgent possibility against cultural displacement and erasure. 

Lee has exhibited, spoken and taught at numerous institutions in North America and Europe. His works are widely published and represented in public and private collections around the world.

• Publisher: ‎DelMonico Books/Art Gallery of Ontario
• Language: ‎English
• Hardcover: ‎224 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎194288494X
• ISBN-13: ‎9781942884941
• Item Weight: ‎2.5 pounds