The white high-heeled shoes that give Nona Faustine’s series its title reappear in every frame. They are the one constant in photographs where she stands naked at sites around New York once central to the city’s slave trade — auction blocks, burial grounds, farms owned by slaveholders, and the shoreline where slave ships docked. *White Shoes* collects these self-portraits, made where history turns tangible.

Faustine positions herself as a conduit, in solidarity with people whose names and memories have been lost but remain embedded in the land. Her self-representation is quiet and defiant at once, answering a long history of depicting Black people through subjugation, phrenology, and pseudo-science. The large-format images refer to and argue with daguerreotypes of enslaved people and photographs commissioned by naturalists. Her nudity — fearless self-possession as much as vulnerability — subverts the inherited place of Black and female nudes in Western art.

Throughout, the talismanic shoes suggest the many adaptations to dominant white culture that were and still are demanded of people of colour. The series is historical and speculative together, asking what is shown and what is withheld, what can be seen and what has been kept from view.

MACK published the hardcover in October 2021: 72 pages, 30 x 29 cm. The book includes newly commissioned texts by Pamela Sneed, Jessica Lanay, and Seph Rodney, and an interview of the artist by Jessica Lanay. Its value for a collection lies in the coherence of the project rather than any claimed rarity: a concentrated body of work on public memory, given a discursive frame by writers who engage the images directly.