820 Ebony/Jet


  • Photographer
    Barbara Karant
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2013-2016
  • Technical Info
    archival pigment prints

This project documents the essence of the Johnson Publishing Company, the most influential African-American owned corporation of its day. It focuses on their historic building in its semi-skeletal state before the last vestiges of the original workspace vanish. These lively interiors fostered the creativity of a staff working in a variety of media, including the iconic Ebony and Jet magazines. The Johnson Building still embodies the spirit of this company who occupied it essentially unaltered from 1972-2012. It remains a genuine cultural time capsule of African-American enterprise: a specific stylistic vocabulary that has survived the passage of the decades. The Johnson Building, stripped of its furnishings presents a unique opportunity: to document the resonant interiors of its long time occupant - interiors which simultaneously represent the spirit of this landmark company and the sense of its loss, of a seminal moment in African-American history and the history of this nation.

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