African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s

This exhibition will present more than one hundred and fifty studio portraits of African Americans from the mid-twentieth century, part of an important recent acquisition by The Met. 

Produced by mostly unidentified makers, the photographs are a poignant, collective self portrait of the African American experience during the 1940s and 1950s—a time of war, middle-class growth, and seismic cultural change.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website