Wendel A. White’s Manifest | Thirteen Colonies began as a question about residue: what the past leaves behind in things, and what those things can still say. Over several years White sought out African American material culture held in the libraries, museums, and archives of the thirteen original English colonies and Washington, DC. The book gathers what the publisher calls a “personal reliquary of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections,” a phrase that captures both the tenderness and the forensic ambition of the project.
The objects range widely. A lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair and Malcolm X’s tape recorder appear alongside a hair straightening comb and a pressed corsage. What unites them is White’s decision to photograph each one the same way: centered against a stark black ground, with shallow depth of field. That consistency is the argument. By giving singular and quotidian materials identical treatment, the pictures dissolve the hierarchy that ordinarily separates relic from refuse, and the viewer is asked to read every item as evidence of Black life and history in the United States.
Published by Radius Books in association with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University, the volume is substantial: 298 pages, 235 images, hardcover, 9.5 by 12 inches. Essays by Cheryl Finley, Ilisa Barbash, and Leigh Raiford set the objects in historical and sociological context, while conversations with Deborah Willis and Brenda Dione Tindal address White’s own formation as a photographer and the earlier bodies of work that led here. The book thus holds image, scholarship, and reflection in one frame.
For collectors of contemporary photography concerned with archives, race, and the American past, the project’s method matters as much as its subjects. White treats public collections as sites of both preservation and silence, and his uniform lighting exposes what institutional custody has kept apart. The photographs do not merely illustrate history; they propose a way of looking at its remains, and the book is built to sustain that proposition at scale.
