You might already recognize the influential figures in Coreen Simpson’s photographs: Winnie Mandela, Eartha Kitt, and Toni Morrison, to name a few. But some of her other images, like her studio portraits and street candids, are familiar in a different way. Simpson’s lens captures them with such intimacy that they might call to mind your neighbors, childhood pastor, or play cousins. Her career archives many years of Black culture, imparting equal esteem to churchwomen in their Sunday best and high-fashion runways. “Every aspect of her electrifying practice is a celebration of Black self-fashioning,” write Sarah Lewis, Leigh Raiford, and Deborah Willis, the editors of “Coreen Simpson: A Monograph” (Aperture, 2025), a new book honoring the photographer’s career since the 1970s. “Art making,” notes jasmineweber in her review of the book, “can be deployed as a tool for self-determination. Simpson’s fastidious depictions of decades reflect back to us the realities of our contemporary mome...