Kerry Stuart Coppin’s pictures highlight
the positive experiences of blacks

erry Stuart Coppin doesn’t write books. But with his camera, he can tell a story just as eloquently as any novelist.

It isn’t just any story that Coppin wants to tell, but one story in particular: the cultural experience of blacks living on both sides of the Atlantic. “I want to capture images that celebrate black culture and people, photographs that tell our story,” says Coppin, an assistant professor of photography and digital imaging in the Department of Art and Art History.

To tell that story, Coppin has trained his lens for the past four years on black communities living in the American Midwest, the African Continent, and Havana, Cuba.

A group of teens holding brass instruments while celebrating Juneteenth festivities in Manhattan, Kansas. A woman in Islamic veils selling shampoo and makeup from her one-room shop in Dakar, Senegal. Flamboyantly costumed men in a stadium in Barbados staging a “Crop Over” parade, a ceremony that harkens back to slave celebrations at the end of sugar cane harvest.

Such images, Coppin says, capture the cultural identity and community experience of the African race, despite their seemingly ordinary nature.

“What takes great skill is showing what is extraordinary about the ordinary,” says Coppin, who has had 11 solo shows this year, the most recent at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. “Often, I’ll photograph something and my guide is thinking, ‘Why take a picture of this?’ But I’m saying that what a street looks like in Senegal also is important because we don’t see pictures of street life in African communities.”

Through his lens, Coppin wants to show an alternative view of the African Continent, one that is different from the all-too-familiar news images of a land fraught with civil war, child soldiers, and dying AIDS patients.

In Havana, Cuba, where he has traveled five times in the last three years, Coppin is examining the lives and experiences of black people in his ongoing photo essay, Negro de Nacion/ Cubans Born of African Descent.

In addition to his recent solo show at Duke, Coppin’s work also is being exhibited this fall at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Rhode Island.

More exhibits will undoubtedly follow, and Coppin hopes to publish a book of his works soon. But for now, there are other communities on which he must train his lens. “There’s a black community in Mexico that I’d like to photograph, and I’ve heard that there are blacks living in Moscow,” Coppin says. Wherever they may be, Coppin will have his lens ready.