Getty Images has launched the Black History & Culture Collection, an initiative created to provide free non-commercial access to historical and cultural images of the African/Black Diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom from the nineteenth century to the present day. The collection aims to grant access to rarely seen images to educators, academics, researchers, and content creators, enabling them to tell untold stories about Black culture.
The Black History & Culture Collection was curated from content owned by Getty Images, in partnership with internationally recognized researchers, historians, and educators, including Deborah Willis of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Jina DuVernay of Clark Atlanta University, Tukufu Zuberi of the University of Pennsylvania, and Mark Sealy and Renée Mussai of Autograph.
“To be involved with the Black History & Culture Collection and work so closely with reframing access to these images made a tremendous impact on me personally and professionally,” said Dr. Willis. “It offered me ways in which to guide my students’ research projects and to show how the Black History & Culture Collection is an active/useful archive that can be used by artists, scholars, families, politicians, and students to recontextualize the past and give new meaning to images that have been largely unknown or underused.”
A video about the new collection may be viewed below.
Are you kidding me Deborah Willis? In NO WAY shape or form that GETTY IMAGES should be the custodian of historical or current imagery of native born Black Americans. In my view GETTY IMAGES is literally conducting itself as a 21st century colonial imagery administrator. No other racial/ethnic group in this country would even allow this to take place in any capacity except for the so-called Black American community.
For those who dissent, I am not concerned about what imagery GETTY IMAGES control regarding the continent of Africa, Central or South America, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, or even the Pacific Islands. Let those people handle their own issues. Also, I totally disagree with these “so-called Black American” academics who are so eager to place native Black American history with the entire African Diaspora. This type of paradigm is both insulting and misguided on numerous levels.