Black Box A Photographic Memoir - Donna Ann McAdams
A black box is a darkroom, a theatre, a camera obscura, and the device that records accidents after they happen. For fifty years photographer Dona Ann McAdams has walked around with her own black box—an analog Leica M2—making unforgettable images of the happy, tragic, historic accidents of her times.
Black Box marries McAdams’ iconic images with her own short lyric texts. Together they form a tender poetic portrait of a young female working-class artist, as well as an unapologetic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, the Culture Wars, and the Performance Art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. From her encounters with artist intellectuals such as Angela Davis, David Wojnarowicz, Maurice Sendak, and Meredith Monk, to her humorous self portraits, Black Box is a book about photography itself as the keeper and framer of memory.
Dona Ann McAdams has been making photographs for over forty years, her work exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The International Center for Photography, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among other places.
Her books include Black Box: A Photographic Memoir (Saint Lucy Books, 2024) and Caught in the Act (Aperture, 1996). She is the recipient of a Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, an Obie and Bessie Award for her performance photography, and grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Arts Council.
She lives on a goat farm in Vermont.
