Tate Photography: Lyle Ashton Harris

This Tate Photography book spotlights the work of New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris.

'I think it's important to talk about the triumph of laying claim to an experience and rechannelling its energy into creative expression that will go back out into the culture where an intergenerational transmission can take place.'

Lyle Ashton Harris spent his adolescence living between New York City and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. This formative period informs his wide-ranging artistic practice in photography, collage, installation and performance — making a commentary on the societal constructs of gender, desire, and race; the complexities of African and African American experience; and his own identity as a queer, Black man.

The Tate Photography series is a celebration of international and British photography in the Tate collection and an introduction to some of the most significant photographers at work today. Each book focuses on an individual photographer and features a specially selected sequence of photographs, an introduction by a Tate curator, and a conversation with the photographer. These collaborations between artists and experts enrich our understanding of photography and its connection to everyday life, and move from city streets to seashores, across landscapes and subcultures, through identities and interiors, in a visual travelogue of our world today.

The theme for Series Three is Queer and Visible, bringing together four artists who use photography to unfold valuable insights into queer life. Each artist uniquely reflects upon societal constructs of sexuality and race and responds to the experience of living in a predominantly white and heteronormative Western society. Desire, identity and joy are artfully explored, upturning assumptions about blackness, race and queerness.

To see and to be seen, representation in good faith, artful storytelling, resonant images. These are the perspectives and qualities we seek from photography. The artist-photographer notices and captures, shows us pattern and meaning, emotion and connection, expanding the possible, making hearts and minds capacious.

• Dimensions 20 x 14 cm
• Material FSC certified paper
• Paperback Yes
• No of pages 64