Coreen Simpson’s lens chronicles Black life, style and self-expression in a new major monograph

20 October 2025

Jamien, 1982. Photograph: Coreen Simpson

Celebrated photographer and jewelry designer Coreen Simpson has finally received the art-world recognition her five-decade career deserves with the publication of Coreen Simpson: A Monograph, part of the prestigious Vision & Justice series by Aperture. In this richly designed volume, readers are invited into Simpson’s vibrant practice an oeuvre that spans black-and-white portraiture, early hip-hop documentation, experimental collage and the intersectional space between image-making and jewelry design.

Born in Brooklyn in 1942 and raised in foster homes, Simpson’s path to photography was neither linear nor handed to her. She began her career as a freelance writer and became frustrated by the images accompanying her work. “I thought the visuals were wrong,” Simpson says in an interview included in the book. “[I] then figured I would take the pictures myself.” That decision marked the start of a journey in which she would photograph literary giants, club-scenes, break-dancers and icons of global culture through a lens that celebrated Black identity, style and agency.

The monograph opens with iconic portraits such as Simpson’s striking 1978 image of Toni Morrison, captured smoking a cigarette and wielding a piercing gaze. The moment encapsulates Simpson’s approach: she doesn’t simply record she engages. “Photography is like survival,” Simpson reflects. “You have to get the photograph, damn it.” Among her subjects are not only Morrison but also figures like Muhammad Ali, Grace Jones and models whose street-style and club presence defined an era. What emerges is a rich archive of Black visual culture that is at once historical document and lively snapshot.

Simpson’s breakthrough series, B-Boys, presents portraits of young people immersed in the burgeoning hip-hop scene of the 1980s. Captured in clubs like the Roxy in New York, these images traverse fashion, identity and power in transit. Her subjects stare boldly into the camera, their gaze asking to be seen, to be acknowledged. In these works, style becomes protest; presence becomes reclamation. Equally compelling is her later work in collage and overpainting—probing the boundaries of photography itself, and reflecting her lifelong ambition to invent her own language.

Parallel to her photographic career was Simpson’s success as a jewelry designer. Her Black Cameo collection adorned icons such as Rosa Parks, Iman and Winnie Mandela, leveraging adornment as a form of cultural statement. The monograph reveals how this jewelry business sustained her artistic independence, allowing her to pursue photography on her own terms. “Jewelry underwrote my photography,” Simpson notes in the book’s interview section.

The volume’s essays bring depth and context to Simpson’s work, authored by scholars such as Bridget R. Cooks, Awol Erizku and Sarah Lewis, the latter founding the Vision & Justice initiative that seeks to recalibrate the photographic canon. One essay describes how Simpson’s work “documents Black life with dignity and style, rewriting visual histories that too often erased that presence.” Her career is framed not just as archive but as activism, as self-fashioning and community reflection.

In conversation, Simpson speaks of how her early life—foster care, absent family photographs, watching street style from a Brooklyn stoop shaped her visual ambitions. She remembers the stoop as her theatre and the camera as her seat in the house of representation. That sense of witnessing yet being unseen fuels her photography, and the results are resolutely personal and political.

The publication of A Monograph at age 83 signals correction and recognition long overdue. Yet Simpson’s energy remains undimmed: “I’ve never gotten bored,” she says, describing how every photo session still thrills her. For readers and viewers the book offers more than images it offers entry to a world where Black identity makes itself visible rather than being gazed upon.

Simpson’s images are rare because they balance elegance with intimacy, visibility with questioning. There is no fetishising of her subjects; rather she invites us to meet them in full presence. In the uncertain space between fashion and documentary she finds freedom and shows us how a portrait can be both cultural artefact and personal gesture.

What this volume reminds us is that style and visual identity are not superficial they are deeply entwined with history, dignity and survival. Simpson’s lens has repeatedly found the moment where these converge. This book offers those moments, in black and white and colour, staged and spontaneous.

In an era when many photographers chase virality and trend cycles, Simpson’s work stands grounded in time, community and truth. Her career prompts the question: who documents our presence when we are invisibilised? It answers softly: we do, and we do it ourselves.