Her intent was to put together an Instagram post of black-and-white portraits. But as she gathered photos, she realized this wasn’t a post; this was a series seven years in the making, explains Atlanta-based portrait photographer Crystal Byrd Uqdah of her series and book, “An Ode to Black Women in Black & White.”

Grieving the death of her mother, “It also hit me that my mother was the one who put a camera in my hands 20 years ago,” Uqdah says. “She handed it to me after I got laid off from my first job and told me to go outside and take some pictures. Sitting with those seven years of images, I realized she started all of this without either of us knowing it.”

When Uqdah was growing up, she and her grandmother would flip through the mounds of family photo albums her grandmother had curated to provide her family with what she didn’t have: images of herself as a child and images of her parents. “She would tell me that most Black people didn’t have access to photography, especially if they were poor,” says Uqdah.

Her grandmother’s experience led Uqdah to New Orleans-based photographer Florestine Perrault Collins, a female Black photographer who documented Black women and families from 1920 to 1949. Collins’ work inspired Uqdah to focus her business on portraiture for Black women. “When I started out, you didn’t see many portrait photographers offering this style of photography within the Black community specifically,” says Uqdah. “That gap was part of what drove me. I wanted my community to have access to that, and I wanted to make sure they were documented beautifully and with intention, so that generations from now their families have something to hold on to.”

In January, Uqdah got to work sorting seven years of her black-and-white portraits of Black women into a series. By February she had a final version of a limited-edition photo book, and in April she hosted a gallery opening of the series at her studio, inviting her portrait subjects as well as area artists, photographers, and the public. “The timeline was a major challenge,” she says, especially since she was grieving her mother, but the work propelled her. “Once I started pulling the images together, I couldn’t stop.” 

Two things tie the photos in the series together, says Uqdah. “Visually, they are all black and white. Thematically, they are all Black women photographed at various stages of life—mothers, grandmothers, sisters, women in transition, women rebuilding. The subject is always the same: Black women being seen on their own terms.” 

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.