Dona Ann McAdams

Black Box: A Photographic Memoir

Publication date: December 2024

Photobooks
Black Box, a memoir by award-winning American photographer Dona Ann McAdams, combines fifty years of black and white photography with the photographer’s own short lyric texts she calls “ditties.” The book brings together McAdams’ striking historical images, taken between 1974 and 2024, with personal reflections that read like prose-poems. 

McAdams is famous for her uncanny ability to be at the right place at the right time to document resistance, protest, and empowered agency across five decades of American culture. She’s captured moments of her community’s history from the Queer Liberation Movement, the Culture Wars, and the Performance Art scene of the 1980s and 1990, to artist intellectual acquaintances like Angela Davis, Meredith Monk, and Maurice Sendak, and a host of others whose paths she crossed, including Harvey Milk, David Bowie, David Wojnarowicz, and John Malkovich.

Press release + Images

Author’s website




About Black Box:


Dona Ann McAdams
ISBN ‎979-8-218-48684-6
Hardcover, 252 Pages, 10 x 9 Inches
Afterword by Joanna Howard
Design by Guenet Abraham
Published by Saint Lucy Books

Press:
Creative Review
All About Photo interview
All About Photo
Artdoc Photography Magazine
L'Œil de la Photographie
Bay Area Reporter
Xtra magazine’s newletter (Dec 20, 2024)



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Copyright

All photographs © Natasha Gafina, unless stated otherwise. 

© 2025, Dana Rakhim