Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Pictures, an anthology by cultural historian and curator Maurice Berger, is the inaugural volume of the Vision & Justice Book Series, coedited by Drs. Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis. Edited by Berger’s husband, curator and scholar Marvin Heiferman, the book collects Berger’s award-winning short essays on photography, originally published between 2012 and 2019 in his monthly New York Times column, “Race Stories.” Berger passed away in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and was not involved in the publication of Race Stories. Each essay explores a photograph or group of photographs through which Berger illuminates stories—both historic and contemporary—about race in America. Berger’s aims are multifaceted: to foster racial and visual literacy, counter harmful stereotypes, and urge introspection. As he puts it, viewers must ask themselves, “What am I doing that is hurting someone else? What can I do to change things?” (16). His essays thus fulfill the broader mission of Vision & Justice—to rewrite the visual history of race in America and explore how images mediate justice and freedom.

Berger’s identity plays a self-aware role in the essays and shapes his perspective on the photographs he analyzes. As a white, Jewish man who grew up in a poor, predominantly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City, Berger recounts becoming acutely aware of how “race is a very visual thing”—and how his “white skin made a difference” in the way he was treated in contrast to his friends (10). While his essays are clearly intended for a general audience, they often seem directed in particular toward a white readership, a population Berger insists must examine itself. Throughout the book, Berger emphasizes the importance of “the value of white self-inquiry” (46), a message likely resonant with the Times’s liberal, educated, and predominantly white audience. Yet, given the orientation of Vision & Justice, the readers of Race Stories will be largely academic or working in the field of photography, raising the question, to whom are Berger’s essays now directed? As the author’s Times text is unchanged in the anthology, his call for white self-inquiry remains as strong as ever six years after he penned his final essay for the newspaper. The editorial choice to leave Berger’s frequent appeals to white readers intact in Race Stories may rightly suggest the field of photography studies still has much work to do.

Rather than presenting Berger’s essays chronologically as they appeared in the Times, Heiferman has grouped them into five thematic chapters. Although these categories make relatively routine claims about the power of photography—how the medium helps viewers see the past anew, understand the present through history, and promote visibility—reading the essays in this format—collected and at once, rather than spread across years—reveals thematic throughlines and substories that may not have been apparent to the original Times reader. This is the power and contribution of the present anthology.  

For example, while chapter one is titled “Revisiting Images: The Past Seen Anew,” the force of the stories in this section rests in the photographs’ potent mundanity, revealing how ordinary moments can serve as powerful lenses into the dynamics of race. In this sense, a central substory of chapter one is the power of the everyday—how seemingly mundane photographs can reveal profound truths about race. This is especially evident in the essay “Whiteness and Race, Between the Storms,” which reflects on a 2015 exhibition at the Teaching Gallery of Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York. Organized by artist Pete Mauney, the show featured vernacular photographs of White Oklahomans during the 1940s and 1950s, offering a lens on race relations through the prism of whiteness. Berger argues that such images disrupt assumptions of racial neutrality and expose how whiteness functions in everyday contexts, often invisibly, with harmful consequences. This critical framing recurs in essays that highlight the significance of photographs depicting everyday Black life. For example, Gordon Parks’s famed 1956 photograph, Department Store, which depicts Joanne Wilson with her niece outside a Mobile, Alabama movie theater’s segregated entrance, captures the subtle power of “quiet refusals” (25) by individuals who resisted racism in daily life—not only through large-scale protests but through lived resilience in small acts.

Chapter two, “Visibility: Strategies of Representation,” is a cumulative exploration of how photographs capture revolutionary stories both public and private, intimate and spectacular, familial and national. Berger demonstrates how photography does more than document upheaval; it also reveals the quieter, complex stories that can shift perception, evoke ambivalence, and catalyze change. For example, Berger highlights how photographs for LIFE Magazine by John Zimmerman of Arthur Ashe at the 1968 US Open (84) became a revolutionary act in their own right—not through the spectacle of Civil Rights demonstrations, but through their portrayal of Black achievement. Berger also wrestles with the tension between visibility and invisibility. He examines photographs that render symbols deliberately invisible, such as Adam Anderson’s photograph of Brittany Bree Newsome removing the Confederate flag from the Alabama State Capitol building in 2015 (90), suggesting that while such symbolic gestures may feel radical, they can obscure deeper, unresolved institutional and emotional realities. True transformation, he argues, demands self-introspection and building relationships in one’s community, not just the removal of symbols.

Chapter three, “History and Memory: Engaging the Past to Understand the Present,” centers on stories of navigation—stories that wade through trauma and confront what Christina Sharpe has termed “the wake” of historical violence, while insisting on Black vitality and presence, or what Katherine McKitrick has described as, “Black livingness.” Berger presents photographs not as static records but as active participants in shaping memory and identity. The chapter engages Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings (2006) to demonstrate how the photos expand the scope of lynching narratives beyond Black victims to include Mexican and Native American victims in the West, exposing how the romanticized myth of frontier justice has obscured systemic violence. His strategy of erasing the lynched body from the image compels viewers to “complete” the photograph in their minds, narrowing the psychic distance between observer and atrocity. In doing so, the photograph becomes an act of resurrection or reanimation—the past brought forcefully into the present. These images shift the viewer’s focus from victim to perpetrator, from history as abstract to history as personal. Berger suggests that this act of beholding is not passive but participatory: the viewer is implicated, made part of a story still unfolding (184). Photographs, then, are not relics of what was, but confrontations with what remains.

Chapter four, “Witnessing: Images as Catalysts for Change,” explores how photographs can shift narratives, provoke white self-inquiry, and redefine who bears responsibility for addressing racial injustice. Berger highlights how the act of witnessing—through the camera and through the viewer—can catalyze not only societal change but personal reckoning. A recurring thread in this chapter is the insistence that white Americans must confront their own roles in perpetuating racism, both historically and in the present. To this end, Berger asserts that photos can challenge expectations about who should speak on race, urging that the burden cannot fall solely on Black Americans. This call for white responsibility echoes across the essays, notably in Berger’s reflections on Florence Mars, a wealthy, white Mississippi landowner and unabashed Civil Rights activist who photographed Mississippi in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and whose barn the Ku Klux Klan later burned to the ground, highlight the moral imperative of white witnessing. Together, this chapter’s essays insist that the power to enact change rests in the sustained act of looking—and in who chooses to do the looking.

Chapter five, “Community: Visualizing the Connections Between Us,” explores how photography affirms relationships and preserves stories of place, identity, and belonging. The powerful essays in this chapter reveal how photos build and reflect community—capturing not only people, but also the changing landscapes they inhabit. Berger discusses how Jamal Shabazz, originally from Red Hook, began photographing Black and Brown communities in New York City in 1980 and did so for four decades, making images that offer a vibrant counter-narrative to negative portrayals of urban life. His work documents scenes of vitality, dignity, and resilience, providing textured portraits of neighborhoods, including Red Hook, in flux. Berger emphasizes how such photography adds nuance to stories about gentrification, displacement, and cultural continuity. This thread continues in his discussion of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work in Braddock, Pennsylvania, initiated around 2005, which documents the impact of deindustrialization and the complex dynamics surrounding gentrification. These photographs serve as community archives—records of transformation and resistance that reject erasure and instead foreground lived experience. Throughout this chapter, Berger underscores how photography can function as a form of care and connection, resisting alienation by rendering visible the deep ties between people and the places they call home. By focusing on the ordinary and the intimate, these essays illustrate how photography not only preserves memory but invites us to recognize our shared humanity across lines of race, class, and geography.

Berger’s Race Stories underscores photography’s power to challenge, connect, and compel. Through intimate, layered essays, he urges us to see race not as distant history but as a lived, visual reality—demanding not just reflection, but responsibility. This collection ultimately insists: looking closely is not enough—we must also act.