Race Stories: Essays

The Race Stories column, published monthly for the Lens Section of the New York Times,  was a continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race by CADVC Research Professor and Chief Curator, Dr. Maurice Berger.

*Click on Title to Access Essay

A close up of a heavily-shadowed woman wearing a top made of cowrie shells looks to her left, where he face is illuminated by a light source outside of the frame.

Lens, New York Times, 3 December  2018

Through self-portraits, Zanele Muholi reimagines black identity and challenges the oppressive standards of beauty that often ignore people of color.

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Behind the bars of a concentration camp. A wire fence stands on the left, and to the right, a brick building. In the center distance, a guard tower looms.

The Holocaust’s Paradox of Good and Evil, in Photographs

Lens, New York Times, 19 November 2018

In her dark and evocative images, Judy Glickman Lauder explores the contrast between the reality of hate, the possibility of defeating it and photography’s role in spurring change.

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A man with his back turned to the camera raises his fist in the air. The emblem on his tank top reads "United States Olympic Team." Another man to his right wears a helmet and holds up his phone, recording something out of frame.

Lens, New York Times, 15 October 2018

Sheila Pree Bright chronicles the longstanding and continuing legacy of black activism in her new book, “#1960Now.”

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A young boy sits in a small room with wood walls, dressing himself on the side of a bed holding a handful of other children with one blanket over them. To the left, two children lay in a crib.

Gordon Parks on Poverty, the ‘Most Savage of Human Afflictions’

Lens, New York Times, 10 September 2018

Mr. Parks realized the power of empathy to help people understand poverty. In this 1961 photo essay, he took readers inside the lives of a Brazilian boy, Flavio da Silva, and his family, who lived in a favela in the hills outside Rio de Janeiro.

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The Jackson family stands before a blank white background a recording studio.

Chronicling the Virtuosity and Struggles of 1970s Soul and Funk Musicians

Lens, New York Times, 27 August 2018. 6 September 2018

Bruce W. Talamon photographed some of music’s brightest stars for a decade. He considers himself “a visual caretaker of black folks’ history.”

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Six people in business attire, spread across the background and foreground, stand on a platform as a train rushes by. The pillars that recede into the background read "50."

The Quiet Heroism of Arthur Ashe

Lens, New York Times, 27 August 2018

In his photographs of Arthur Ashe’s historic victory at the 1968 US Open, John G. Zimmerman depicted the athlete as he lived, a complex and self-possessed man in the midst of a life-altering event.

 

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A close up of a man wearing sunglasses, smiling as he holds a smiling child at head level to him.

Revealing the Lives of Black Fathers

Lens, New York Times, 6 August 2018

Robyn Price Pierre looked to her family, classmates and friends to create personal photos exploring black fatherhood.

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A white picket fence and white house are barely visible in the darkness of night.

Escaping to Freedom, in the Shadows of the Night

Lens, New York Times, 5 July 2018

A new series by the photographer Dawoud Bey summons a time in African-American history when the journey to freedom was made largely under cover of night.

 

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These 1970s Pageants Celebrated Black Women’s Beauty

For some women, members of West London’s Afro-Caribbean communities, pageants nurtured racial pride and self-expression.

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50 Years After Their Mug Shots, Portraits of Mississippi’s Freedom Riders

Lens, New York Times, 15 May 2018

The journalist and photographer Eric Etheridge provides visual and oral histories of the courageous men and women known as the Freedom Riders in the 1960s.

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Dr. King’s Complex Relationship with the Camera

Lens, New York Times, 30 March 2018

The most compelling photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were neither idealized nor simplistic, but endeavored to portray his complexity and humanity.

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Documenting the Dynamic Black Community of 1940s Seattle

Lens, New York Times, 27 March 2018

In the 1940s, Al Smith documented a heroic period for Seattle jazz in the integrated establishments of Jackson Street, where African-American performers and customers were embraced.

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An Elegy to India’s Vanishing Cinemas

Lens, New York Times, 7 February 2018

Nandita Raman spent three years photographing the decline of India’s single-screen movie houses for her series “Cinema Play House.”

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A Photographer’s Search for the Magic in Everyday Life

Lens, New York Times, 9 January 2018

Shawn Walker, a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, documented the lives of regular people and liberated his subjects from stereotypes and invisibility.

 

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Using Photography to Tell Stories About Race

Lens, New York Times, 6 December 2017

Maurice Berger, a research professor and curator, looks back on the events that led him to write about race and photography.

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Finding Inspiration in the Struggle at Resurrection City

Lens, New York Times, 24 October 2017

Jill Freedman left behind a career in advertising to live at Resurrection City, an encampment on the National Mall that was part of the Poor Peoples Campaign. Her pictures show a different, human and optimistic side to a historical event that has been labeled a failure by some.

 

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Making Chicano Life Visible

Lens, New York Times, 14 September 2017

A new exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West documents the relatively unknown story of photography’s important role in the Chicano movement.

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The Cinematic Images of Gordon Parks

Lens, New York Times, 28 August 2017

Gordon Parks, perhaps more than any mid-20th-century photographer, understood how film and television conditioned the contemporary eye and mind.

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The Faces of Bigotry: When the Hoods Come Off
Lens, New York Times, 21 August 2017

The pictures from Charlottesville, Va., reveal what pictures of oppression and violence generally do not: the ordinary people who typically perpetuate white supremacy.

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Black Soldiers: Fighting America’s Enemies Abroad and Racism at Home

Lens, New York Times, 5 June 2017

A book documents the complex history of African American soldiers, illuminating their triumphs and challenges.

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Jamel Shabazz’s 40-Years of Sights and Styles in New York

Lens, New York Times, 2 May 2017

Four decades ago, Jamel Shabazz set out to photograph black and Latino young people in New York City and explore the uplifting power of style, fashion, music and culture.

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The Lasting Power of Emmett Till’s Image

Lens, New York Times, 5 April 2017

The controversy over a white artist’s painting of Emmett Till’s corpse raises issues of appropriation without historical context.

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From Slavery to Freedom: Revealing the Underground Railroad

Lens, New York Times, 29 March 2017

While much has been written about the Underground Railroad, there has been little visual documentation. But a new photo book depicts the 1,400 mile long trek through forests, swamps, safe houses, and freedom in the north.

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Rarely Seen Photos of Japanese Internment

Lens, The New York Times, 8 February 2017

Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Japanese Americans interned during World War 2 capture not only the oppression of a people but also their struggle to retain their dignity.

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A Photographer Who Made “Ghosts” Visible

A major retrospective of the work of Ming Smith, a member of the Kamoinge Collective, showcases images that summon up dreamlike states that tease out complex emotions and ideas.

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The Heartbeat of Our Being, in Black and White

Whether depicting the spectacle of people barreling forward in a snowstorm or the faces of his subjects, mostly black but also white, Adger Cowans’ lyrical images portray life as resonant with feeling.

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Black Male Glamour, as Style and Substance

In “Vintage Black Glamour: Gentlemen’s Quarters,” Nichelle Gainer explores how prominent and accomplished black men shaped their image through personal style, taking charge of how they were seen to defy stereotypes.

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Photographing Civil Rights, Up North and Beyond

Lens, The New York Times, 18 October 2016

While the most indelible images from the civil rights era were of protest and conflict in the South, a new book explores the discrimination African-Americans struggled against in the North and elsewhere.

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On the Streets of Harlem, a Sense of ‘Erase and Replace’

Lens, The New York Times, 11 October 2016

 Dawoud Bey’s large-scale photos of Harlem show the legendary cradle of African-American life confronting speculation, displacement and gentrification.

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Reconsidering the Black Panthers, Through Photo

Lens,The New York Times, 8 September 2016

A book and exhibit document the complexities of the Black Panther Party, a storied group that the F.B.I. once deemed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

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Whiteness and Race, Between the Storms

Lens, The New York Times, 11 August 2016

Pete Mauney asks viewers to look at race relations through white eyes in order to confront unspoken privilege and the lack of diversity in their lives.

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Photographs that Challenge Stereotypes about African American Youth

Lens, The New York Times, 19 July 2016

Picturing Children, the latest in a series of books published by the Smithsonian’s soon-to-open National Museum of African American History and Culture, resonates with the joy, contentment, resistance, determination, dissent and the routines of everyday African-American life.

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Black Dandies, Style Rebels with a Cause

Lens, The New York Times, 16 June 2016

The traveling exhibit “Dandy Lion” presents striking images of dapper men of African descent whose sartorial flair challenges notions of race and masculinity.

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Why Chinatown Still Matters

Lens, The New York Times, 16 May 2016

Dean Wong’s new book on Chinese-American communities is a powerful corrective to decades of reporting on neighborhoods often represented in the cultural mainstream as exotic, insular or irrelevant.

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Lee Friedlander’s Overlooked Civil Rights Photographs

Lens, The New York Times, 22 February 2016

A new book shows how before Lee Friedlander became known as the quintessential street photographer, he chronicled an important — if sometimes overlooked — moment in civil rights history.

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Kamoinge’s Half Century of African American Photography

Lens, The New York Times, 22 January 2016

A new book takes a look at the collective’s groundbreaking work in “speaking of our lives as only we can.”

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The Modern Spirits of Ebony and Jet

Lens, The New York Times, 3 December 2015

Images of the empty interiors at the modernist headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company uncannily embody the spirit of the groundbreaking African-American company that occupied the building for 40 years.

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Gordon Parks’s Harlem Argument

Lens, The New York Times, 11 November 2015

A look at Gordon Parks’s first photo essay for Life shows how editors’ choices of words and pictures can manipulate meaning.

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Photographing Japan, Through Shadows of the Past

Lens, The New York Times, 6 October 2015

Ishiuchi Miyako came of age in postwar Japan, in a town where she was caught between the lure of American pop culture and the fear of the military occupation that accompanied it.

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A Meditation on Race, in Shades of White

Lens, The New York Times, 17 September 2015

Marion Palfi set out to document racism and segregation in Georgia in the 1940s. Her unpublished manuscript that followed reveals racial attitudes that were neither uniform nor without ambivalence.

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CHINA PHOTO BOOK-lens-photobook-slide-9YTH-mediumThreeByTwo440-v2

In China, the Photobook as Art and History

Lens, The New York Times, 30 July 2015

An ambitious survey of China’s rich and diverse history of photobooks represents a turning point in narrowing the comprehension gap between East and West.

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Making a Confederate Flag Invisible

Lens, The New York Times, 30 June 2015

Removing the Confederate flag from the public square is but a first step toward deeper reflection on race.

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Past and Present Collide in Pittsburgh

Lens, The New York Times, 2 June 2015

Sometimes it takes a connection to the past to better understand the present. For essayists exploring African-American life in Pittsburgh, a trove of 80,000 photos taken by Charles “Teenie” Harris proves a great inspiration.

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African-American Life, Double-Exposed

Lens, The New York Times, 17 April 2015

Through the African American Lens, culled from a Smithsonian collection, shows how photography – and black photographers – reshaped a people’s image.

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Documenting Selma, from the Inside

Lens, The New York Times, 2 Mar 2015

The best-known images of the civil rights era were often dramatic and shocking, intentionally so, to jar a nation into action. But James Barker provided a quieter, insider’s perspective to the daily struggle.

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Complicating the Picture of Urban Life

Lens, The New York Times, 23 Feb 2015

A new exhibit features three Bronx-born photographers whose work explores the idea of community while challenging outdated, lingering notions.

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Robert Frank, Telling it like it Was

Lens, The New York Times, 15 Jan 2015

Robert Frank’s favorite image from “The Americans” captures the contradiction of racism in the liberal climes of mid-century San Francisco.

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Finding Robert Frank, Online

Lens, The New York Times, 14 Jan 2015

A new online resource from the National Gallery allows viewers to explore its vast collection of Robert Frank’s work – from contact sheets to ephemera.

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American Culture, Riding a Mushroom Cloud

Lens, The New York Times, 24 Dec 2014

In “Chewing Gum and Chocolate,” Shomei Tomatsu explored the attractions and contradictions of American culture and the military in postwar Japan.

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VINTAGE BLACK GLAMOUR-lens-glamour-slide-6YW2-superJumbo

When Glamour Speaks Your Name

Lens, The New York Times, 28 Nov 2014

A new book by Nichelle Gainer, Vintage Black Glamour, looks at the history of how black women used style and substance to counter stereotypes — or invisibility — in the mainstream.

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A Limited View of Boys from the Bronx

Lens, The New York Times, 22 Oct 2014

Examining Stephen Shames’s new book “Bronx Boys,” Maurice Berger raises questions about the responsibilities inherent in documenting a community.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Notion of Family

Lens, The New York Times, 14 Oct 2014

LaToya Ruby Frazier looked at her family’s history to build an enduring narrative of African-American life in the Rust Belt town where she was raised.

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Black Fathers, Present and Accountable

Lens, The New York Times, 19 Sep 2014

Zun Lee has produced a photo book that challenges the persistent narrative that African-American fathers are absent from the lives of their children.

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In Ferguson, Photographs as Powerful Agents

Lens,The New York Times, 20 Aug 2014

The history of black representation has resonated with the types of images now prevalent in social media. Whether in 1950s Mississippi or Ferguson today, the camera has served as witness, provocateur and agent of change.

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Meditation on President Obama’s Portrait

Lens, The New York Times, 25 July 2014

A portrait of Barack Obama before he became president reveals an unguarded moment in the life of a very private man.

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What the Camera Sees, and Doesn’t See

Lens, The New York Times, 27 June 2014

A life-changing illness led Kim Weston to return to her roots, both in art and family, exploring the ties between relatives and the past.

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Latin Americas Mutating Cities, in Photographs

Lens, The New York Times, 16 May 2014

An ambitious new exhibit shows the many transformations – social, physical and cultural – that have remade Latin America.

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A Cultural History of Civil Rights

Lens, The New York Times, 10 May 2014

A recent book chronicles the artistic and cultural efforts that were an essential – if overlooked – part of the civil rights movement.

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Holding a Mirror to Race

Lens, The New York Times, 24 March 2014

A new website uses vintage photos — presented at first without context — to get viewers to confront everyday assumptions about race.

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FRAZIER BORN BY A RIVER-lens-frazier-slide-ICAG-superJumbo

Born by a River, Watching the Change

Lens, The New York Times, 21 February 2014

For some, Braddock, Pa., embodies the decline of the small Rust Belt town. For LaToya Ruby Frazier, it is home, which she explores in a series of elegiac images.

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Black Performers, Fading from Frame, and Memory

Lens, The New York Times, 22 January 2014

Carrie Mae Weems’s series “Slow Fade to Black” plays on the concept of the cinematic fade, showing mid-20th century female black performers “disappearing, dissolving before our eyes.”

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Pictures of Men, Friends or Lovers

Lens, The New York Times, 10 January 2014

A collection of images of African-American men together, from the Civil War to the present, challenges modern discomfort with male intimacy, sexual or otherwise.

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One Drop, but Many Views on Race

Lens, The New York Times, 16 December 2013

A series of portraits and an accompanying book argue that racial identity is not merely biological or genetic, but also a matter of context and even personal choice.

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A Civil Rights Photographer, and a Struggle, are Remembered

Lens, The New York Times, 14 November 2013

By chronicling the Delano grape strike in California in the 1960s, Jon Lewis exposed the harrowing story of labor behind the fruits and vegetables that Americans consumed without thought.

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Anonymous Men, Made Real

Lens, The New York Times, 7 October 2013

An exhibition seeks to restore the humanity and immediacy of the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Army, the first black regiment raised in the North during the Civil War.

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Re-imagining a Tragedy, 50-Years Later

Lens, The New York Times, 13 September 2013

Dawoud Bey explores the relationship of past to present with diptychs of people the same age as the victims of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing — both at the time of the bombings and in the present day.

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A Momentous Day Driven by Ordinary People

Lens, The New York Times, 22 August 2013

The photography of Leonard Freed, whose images explored the March on Washington at ground level, still resonates 50 years after that historic day.

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A Russian American Photographer in Native Alaska

Lens, The New York Times, 17 July 2013

In southeastern Alaska at the turn of the 20th century, a Russian-American photographer’s intimate understanding of his community was a prerequisite for photographing it.

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The Woman in a Jim Crow Photo

Lens, The New York Times, 6 June 2013

Gordon Parks documented some of the quieter, but no less compelling or important, moments of the civil rights struggle. Decades later, one of his subjects recalls a poignant image.

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Civil Rights, One Person and One Photo at a Time

Lens, The New York Times, 22 April 2013

In the midst of the national struggle for civil rights, James Karales, born into an immigrant Greek family in Ohio, turned his camera on the individuals fighting for rights and respect.

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Framing—and Reflecting—Beauty

Lens, The New York Times, 11 March 2013

A photo in Deborah WIllis’s new exhibit shows a woman holding a mirror inside a beauty parlor. It underscores how African-Americans have constructed their image to empower themselves.

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Images of Emancipation

Lens, The New York Times, 20 December 2012

A new book argues that photography was not incidental but central to the war against slavery, racism and segregation in the 1850s through the 1930s.

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Lynchings in the West, Erased from History and Photos

Lens, The New York Times, 6 December 2012

Seeking to underscore a seemingly absent history, Ken Gonzales-Day altered 19th and 20th century postcards of lynchings in the American West, removing the bodies from the original scenes.

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Malcolm X as Visual Strategist

Lens, The New York Times, 19 September 2012

Malcolm X was keenly aware of the power of images to transform the 20th century.

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A Radically Prosaic Approach to Civil Rights Images

Lens, The New York Times, 16 July 2012

Gordon Parks’s photographs of blacks in the South at the height of the Jim Crow era showed African-Americans living “in a complete universe.” Many, however, were unpublished or unseen until now.