Photo Study Picks: Building, Refuge, Witness
By Joe Doherty
February 5, 2026—How do you photograph persistence? Spanning more than a century of Black image making, the images in this edition attempt an answer. They examine dignity asserted in a 1907 classroom; landscapes where safety and shelter were sought; and how collective action, the driver of any kind of meaningful change, leaves traces in its wake.
James Van Der Zee
James Van Der Zee (American, 1886–1983). Whittier Preparatory School, Phoebus, Virginia, 1907 (printed 1974). Gelatin silver print. The Stanley Hawks Memorial Fund. 74.36.2
In 1907, 42 years after Emancipation, James Van Der Zee photographed students at Whittier Preparatory School in Phoebus, Virginia. His composition is deliberate: rows of young people face the camera with quiet self-possession. At a time when Black Americans were systematically excluded, erased, and terrorized, Van Der Zee insisted on a different image—one of dignity and aspiration.
More than a century later, the students’ steady gazes remind us that education and community have long been acts of resistance and care, a legacy carried in the name Whittier, shared between this Virginia school and a Minneapolis neighborhood, both honoring the abolitionist poet.
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953). Untitled #18, (Creek and House), 2017 (printed 2018). Gelatin silver print. Gift of funds from Mary and Bob Mersky. 2021.57.2
Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly series turns away from spectacle toward quiet, inward reflection. Bey photographs landscapes associated with the Underground Railroad, framing darkness as a shelter and space where people moved, waited, and sought safety under the cover of night. The image’s stillness echoes Langston Hughes’s 1924 poem “Dream Variations,” in which night arrives gently, as a place of rest and self-possession:
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me—
That is my dream.
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems, Painting the Town #4 (Painting the Town series), 2021 (printed 2024). The Milton K. and Margie M. Woodhouse Endowment for Art Acquisition and the Marguerite S. McNally Endowment for Art Acquisition, 2025.43
Though empty of people, Carrie Mae Weems’s photograph is imbued with a sense of collective presence. Painting the Town #4 captures what remains after protest, after public expression, after people have gathered and dispersed. These marks are not damage. They’re the physical record of care, urgency, and the need to be heard.
Weems photographs the exterior in stillness, holding space for both what has passed and what has yet to arrive.
About Joe Doherty, Collection Care Specialist
A collection care specialist with a focus in photography, Joe Doherty oversees the preservation and management of Mia’s nearly 13,000 photographs. He has a graduate certificate in Museum Collections Management and Care from George Washington University and earned his master’s degree in fine art at the University of Alberta, Canada. Doherty has a passion for preventive conservation; education; and diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion work within the cultural heritage sector.