“How lucky we are that Catherine E. McKinley has collected this exquisite series of photographs from all corners of the African continent … proof of the range of beauty and elegance the world was otherwise telling us we could not possess.”
— Edwidge Danticat, from the Introduction
A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women
“As I slowly moved through the stunningly beautiful pages of The African Lookbook, I found myself being transported by the glorious photographs Catherine McKinley has collected to a narrative that brings clarity to those summers. As the saying goes, Black people have always traveled with our pain and our medicines. My mother, a southerner and me, a child of the great migration, trace our roots back to the west coast of Africa. As I pored over the lovely fabrics, the pride on the faces of the women and girls in this book, the adornments that were literally skin deep, I understood again that my long days spent in that classroom was about more than my mom wanting me to learn a trade – whether she knew it or not. Our sewing was and continues to be our pain – and our medicine.
Laced within the beauty of these pages are the elliptical and evocative poem-like narratives Mckinley uses to describe all that we are seeing – and by extension, all that we feel.
Last summer, I returned from Ghana with my suitcases loaded down with African fabric. In the years since those Singer sewing classes, I’ve returned to my sewing machine and have come a long way from pink cotton fabric and sizzler sets. Still, what I am reminded as I again and again pore over the pages in this book, is that my mother’s dream for me was part of a long line of dreams mothers of the African Diaspora had for their daughters. Dreams that trace themselves back to the continent itself. We took and continue to take the skin, the pain, the fabric, the tools we have. And with all of this – as Catherine has done here – we make something as beautiful as our own selves.”
— Jacqueline Woodson