Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People

A film that explores how African American communities have used the camera as a tool for social change from the invention of photography to the present. This epic tale poetically moves between the present and the past, through contem
The film explores the role of photography, since its rudimentary beginnings in the 1840s, in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present. The dramatic arch is developed as a visual narrative that flows through the past 160 years to reveal black photography as an instrument for social change, an African American point-of-view on American history, and a particularized aesthetic vision.