Makeda Best ’97

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In 1991, when I was 15, my father took me to see photographer Brian Lanker’s exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, “I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.” As I was already a fan of photographic portraiture, which I eagerly sought out in the pages of magazines like Vanity Fair and books such as Richard Avedon’s American West, seeing all these portraits of African American women and reading their stories was transformative. Lanker’s portraits are so subtle in the moods they capture and in the way they draw on the possibilities of black-and-white film and printing. This was the first photography exhibition catalog that I owned, and I still have it.

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I already had a camera, and I’d always made photographs of my family. Following the Lanker show, I got inspired to work on my portraiture and to shoot in black and white. Some of the portraits I made were exhibited in the Dean’s Office at Barnard shortly after I arrived as a transfer student in the fall of 1994. I had shown them to Dean Vivian Taylor, and she suggested putting them up in the waiting area above the couches.

Seeing Lanker’s exhibition opened up something else for me too, beyond the inspiration to make my own photographs. Along with the catalog, I got the calendar. When the year was done, I wanted to keep the pictures, so I started pulling apart the calendar. I also had a collection of photo postcards about African American life. I had a box of James Van Der Zee postcards. One of my favorite postcards was a photograph by Leonard Freed of Martin Luther King Jr. in Baltimore in 1964 — he’s riding in the back of a convertible through a crowd, and his hand is outstretched and the crowd is rushing to touch him. I took the postcards and the Lanker pictures and put them up in my bedroom. And then I took a picture of my cousin standing in my first “exhibition.”

In August 2023, I joined the Oakland Museum in my new role as Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs — it was moving for me to visit the gallery where the exhibition was held and to discover the poster in the collection.