In 1967, a twenty-three-year-old graduate journalism student in Missouri took a commission from a friend and went to Norfolk, Virginia, to photograph a single Black family. David Alan Harvey spent roughly a month living with James and Callie Liggins and their seven children, then aged two to fifteen, and the resulting photo essay became his first book. Tell It Like It Is appeared in 2015 from BurnBooks, re-publishing that early body of work nearly five decades after it was made.

The book’s method is immersion rather than survey. Harvey did not assemble a broad typology of Black family life; he stayed with one household and let daily routine accumulate into a portrait. The Ligginses opened their door, and the photographs follow the ordinary texture of a home — children, rooms, gestures, the unremarkable hours that a family recognizes as its own. The approach places the book within the documentary tradition while keeping its scale deliberately intimate.

For this edition, Anton Kusters and Diego Orlando handled layout and design, with Paolo Lecca on image color correction and Michael Courvoisier and Kaya Lee Berne on production. Grafiche Antiga in Treviso, Italy, offset-printed the volume. A percentage of profits was directed to the Liggins family and toward a scholarship for a minority photographer — a detail that connects the book’s making to the people it depicts.

Collectors of postwar American documentary photography will find the book significant on several counts. It restores an early, formative project by a photographer better known for later work, and it documents a collaboration between subject and author that was negotiated rather than assumed. The 2015 edition also represents a considered act of re-publication: a historical body of images revisited, redesigned, and returned to circulation with its obligations to its subjects made explicit.