After meeting Barbara and her mother in a dollar store, Lawson photographed them in their home. They lean intimately against each other and smile warmly at the camera, surrounded by belongings that include video games, family heirlooms, awards, and a Bible. Even with meager resources, the women clearly cultivate beauty in their lives, conveyed by the lampshade cover, vase of artificial flowers, and careful attention to jewelry and nail polish, including a pedicure on the toes of the mother’s prosthetic leg.

Lawson’s carefully staged portraits are created in collaboration with her working-class Black subjects, disavowing a long history of ethnographic, stereotyped, and racist photographic imagery of Black communities. As writer Zadie Smith has described, “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)