White Shoes

White Shoes collects Nona Faustine's self-portraits made at sites around New York that were tied to the city's part in the slave trade, where she poses nude apart from a pair of white high-heeled shoes.

She stands at places such as former slave auction sites, burial grounds, farms worked by enslaved people and landing points for slave ships. MACK says the large-format images respond to earlier ways of picturing Black people, including daguerreotypes of enslaved people and photographs commissioned by naturalists. In MACK's reading, the white shoes stand for the adjustments to dominant White culture that people of color have been expected to make. The book carries new texts by Pamela Sneed, Jessica Lanay and Seph Rodney, and an interview with Faustine by Lanay. MACK published it in October 2021 as a 72-page hardcover, 30 x 29 cm, and also issued a signed edition with a slip signed by the artist glued into the inside back cover.

Faustine was born in Brooklyn in 1977. She earned a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in 1997 and an MFA from the International Center of Photography at Bard College in 2013. Her first solo exhibition, My Country, ran at Baxter St Camera Club of New York from December 2016 to January 2017 and included works from the White Shoes series. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Carnegie Museum.