The MassArt Graduate Programs and Photography department are pleased to welcome Judith Black as a visiting artist of the Fall 2025 Photography Lecture Series. Please join us in the Tower Auditorium at 2:00pm on Tuesday, December 2.

Known for her large format photographs using Polaroid Type 55 black and white film, Judith Black has been a practicing photographer since 1979, the year she entered a Master of Science in Visual Studies program at the Creative Photo Lab at MIT. During that time she realized that her most potent subject matter was close to home, recording herself, her family of four children and partner. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, Black was part of a new wave of photographers arising in the 1980s whose work revealed how the domestic interior, the lives of children, and the daily habits of the family are filled with meaning and arresting visual content.

Judith Black’s work has been shown at museums internationally and is included in permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard University Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Polaroid International Collection.

Stanley Barker Books has published two books by Black. The first, Pleasant Street, was short-listed for Best First Photobook of the year by Aperture/ParisPhoto in 2020. It features photographs of her immediate family in and around her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Her second book, Vacation, was released in 2021. It focuses on friends and family she visited on a cross country trip with her children in 1986.

All Photography lectures are free and open to the public. 

Questions? Contact gradprogram@massart.edu

Image detail: Judith Black, Malcolm, June 20, 2002