Coreen Simpson

Coreen Simpson was born on the eighteenth of February 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. As she has recalled, she possesses no photographs of herself as a child, for she and her brother spent their early years in an orphanage and then in foster homes in Brooklyn, where she was raised by the Davis family. She attended Samuel J. Tilden High School and later studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design, and in 1977 worked under the photographer Frank Stewart at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Her path into photography opened in 1980, when she became an editor at Unique New York and began making pictures to accompany her writing. She soon worked as a freelance photographer for the Village Voice and the Amsterdam News, chronicling African-American cultural and political life. Carrying a portable studio into downtown nightclubs, Harlem barbershops, and Queens braiding salons, she made portraits praised for their depth of character and quiet dignity.

Among her enduring works is the B-Boys series of the early 1980s, an intimate record of young people at the dawn of hip-hop, and the later AboutFace collages begun in 1991. As a designer, she created the Black Cameo in 1990, restoring an ancient form to honor the faces of Black women; it was worn by figures from the model Iman to Rosa Parks, and in 1993 she partnered with Avon on an affordable line.

Her photographs endure in the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. Still living and still working into her ninth decade, Coreen Simpson gave a generation its own reflection — and we honor the hand that returned so many faces to the light of memory.