Deana Lawson is the most comprehensive publication on the artist’s work to date, providing an overview of fifteen years of her photography practice. It was published to accompany her first museum survey, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2021–22), and traveled to MoMA PS1, New York (2022), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022–23). Lawson’s portraits of individuals in the United States and throughout the African diaspora interrogate the conventions of photography. Made in collaboration with her subjects, her work samples the photographic language of studio portraiture, vernacular snapshots, and staged tableaux to relate narratives of love, desire, beauty, and defiance.

The book focuses on works made by Lawson between 2005 and 2021 and includes essays by exhibition curators Eva Respini and Peter Eleey alongside texts by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Tina M. Campt, Alexander Nemerov, and Greg Tate. A conversation between Lawson and Deborah Willis discusses her origins as an artist, the nature of her photography, and the themes she seeks to address in her work.