Deana Lawson
Deana Lawson (born 1979, Rochester, New York, U.S.) is an American photographer best known for her large-scale staged photographs that explore Black identity. Her subjects are often strangers she comes across in her everyday life—on the train, at a restaurant, or at a garage sale, for example—and she typically places them in everyday settings such as a bedroom, kitchen, or living room, often in a peculiar pose, outfit, or grouping. The New York Times described her sitters as “[tending] to look directly into the camera with a cool self-possession that spells out the power dynamic, lest you be confused by the rawness of the scene. Her subjects are not at the viewer’s mercy. We are merely observing, and lucky for the privilege to do so.” Lawson cites portraits and vernacular family albums as inspiration as well as the ways Black culture finds expression in the body and domestic spaces.
Early life and education
Lawson grew up alongside her twin sister, Dana Lawson, in Rochester, New York, where the headquarters of Kodak, the famed manufacturer of film and photographic supplies, are located. She has often said that her career in photography was predestined, as her mother, Gladys Lawson, worked at Kodak for more than 35 years as an administrative assistant, and her father, Cornelius Lawson, was the family photographer. Lawson’s grandmother is also thought to have been a housekeeper for Kodak founder George Eastman.
As children, Lawson and her sister were inseparable. They were part of a program that bussed students from the city to attend a suburban school but were later transferred to an inner-city school after being expelled for fighting. Lawson described the transition to The New York Times in 2021 as “the first time I realized class disparity in education and what privilege and access students had or didn’t have.” In 1997 Deana and Dana Lawson enrolled in the international business program at Pennsylvania State University, sharing a dorm during their first year. About this time, Dana Lawson was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and left business school to focus on African American studies and English. Deana Lawson, meanwhile, applied to study fashion design at Parsons School of Design in New York City, was denied, and eventually found her place studying photography at Penn State.
Lawson met painter Aaron Gilbert in 2000, and the couple soon had a son, Judah, who was born about the time Lawson graduated from Penn State with a B.F.A. in 2001 (the couple later had a daughter, Grace). She then enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) together with Gilbert—she studying photography and he studying painting. While at RISD, Lawson impressed her adviser, conceptual artist Sarah Charlesworth, with a photograph she took of her mother dressed in her wedding gown and sitting in the family home. “That was the beginning of the familial gaze, and the element of staging, in connection to real life,” Lawson told The New York Times.
Lawson graduated with an M.F.A. in 2004 and moved to Rochester while Gilbert finished his degree. She did administrative work at a law firm, data entry, customer service, and telemarketing. In her free time, she took a class in salsa dancing and asked her teacher to pose for a photograph. “That became my first nude, and it inspired how I would work later,” she recalled in The New York Times. After Gilbert came to Rochester, Lawson took the summer off to practice photography full time. She drove around looking for potential models and settings, a practice she said “crystallized so many of my methods.” In 2006 Lawson, Gilbert, and their son moved to New York City, where Lawson took an administrative job at the International Center of Photography. There she had the benefit of taking as many free classes as she wanted, and she took the opportunity to develop the technical aspects of her photography.
Turning point and recognition
A turning point in Lawson’s career came when the Museum of Modern Art in New York selected several of her pieces to show at their “New Photography” show in 2011. The photographs were emblematic of her unusual style. Baby Sleep (2009), for example, captures a nude woman being caressed by a shirtless man in a bare living room where a baby sleeps in a swing nearby, while Roxie and Raquel, New Orleans, Louisiana (2010) shows twins posing in awkward symmetry on what might be their bed in a worn, yellow room.
In 2012 Lawson began teaching at Princeton University, and the following year she received the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled her to travel and take photographs in Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her work from these travels includes Mickey & Friends <3 (2013), a photo showing two nude women, whose bodies face one another and whose hands hold each others’ hips, standing in front of a wall in Kingston, Jamaica, with a painting of Mickey Mouse holding an ice cream cone. Another, Mama Goma, Gemena, Democratic Republic of the Congo (2014), depicts a woman holding up her palms and wearing a lustrous blue gown with a hole to emphasize her pregnancy. Several of these photographs were shown at Lawson’s solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Lawson gained wider recognition when her photograph Binky & Tony Forever (2009) was featured on the cover of Freetown Sound, Blood Orange’s 2016 album. The photo shows a young couple embracing on golden bedspread. She received further attention when her work was shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and in 2018 she photographed Rihanna for Garage magazine. The photographs show the R&B singer and cosmetics mogul dressed glamorously in vibrant ruffles, a look that is at odds with the worn domestic backdrop.
The Hugo Boss Prize and other exhibitions from the 2020s
Lawson received the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize, the first photographer to win the award, which came with a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The resulting show, titled “Centropy” (2021), had at its center a hologram of a torus, a ring-shaped surface created by a circle rotated on an axis in its plane. A few of her new large-scale photographs also included holograms, three-dimensional images created from the same technology that made possible a performance by deceased rapper Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. “The holography allows [viewers] to reflect back on the photographs,” Ashley James, one of the curators of the show, explained to Artnet News in 2021. Holography asks viewer to think about how photography “can both reflect the real and approximate the superreal. I think that’s a question that guides the work.” In addition, Lawson directed a short film for the exhibition, also called “Centropy,” which explores the artist’s process. She followed up on the exhibition with a traveling survey of her work (2021–23) that started at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and ended at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
