Introduction: Photography and Race Available to Purchase

Elizabeth Abel is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis and the co-editor of Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Articles drawn from her recent work on race and visual culture have appeared in Critical Inquiry and Representations. Her contribution to this issue is derived from her forthcoming book, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow.

Leigh Raiford is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-editor with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006); and is working on a book titled Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: History, Memory and the Photography of African American Social Movements.