The Met Breuer

African American Portraits

Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s

26 Jun - 08 Oct 2018

AFRICAN AMERICAN PORTRAITS
Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s
26 June – 8 October 2018

This exhibition presents more than one hundred and fifty studio portraits of African Americans from the mid-twentieth century, part of an important recent acquisition by The Met. Produced by mostly unidentified makers, the photographs are a poignant, collective self portrait of the African American experience during the 1940s and 1950s—a time of war, middle-class growth, and seismic cultural change.