Trailer for the documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
Docu explores the role that photography, since its rudimentary beginnings in the 1840s, has played in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans, from slavery to the present.
At every critical juncture, African American photographers have been there—documenting the transformation from slave to hip-hop artist, from sharecropper to corporate executive, and from the urban housing project to the White House. Their lenses have captured the stories and the ordinary lives of a people who have been an integral part of making America what it is and keeping America’s focus on the great promise of what it can become.