Atlanta photographer captures 107 Black women’s ‘becoming era’ in new book

There’s a woman in photographer Bessie Akuba Winn’s forthcoming book “Our Kind of Women” wearing a flower in her hair, tucked and pinned the way Billie Holiday used to.

Winn found it striking. “I asked her, What’s up with the flower,” she said.

The answer: Something in her spirit had told her that her late mother-in-law, who’d always worn a flower in her hair, wanted to come, too.

“I said, ‘Stop right there, let’s go sit on this stool so I can take your picture while you’re telling me the story,’” she said. “I knew we had something. You could feel it.”

That’s the kind of portraiture Bessie Akuba Winn has spent a year documenting, 107 times over, for 107 different women.

It’s her sweet spot, she said: “a series of archives on Black identity, starting first with ‘Our Kind of Women’” — portraits of women “redefining what it means to live life, to be over 40, and living life on your terms.”

Winn was born in Ghana, to a Ghanaian mother and a Black American father — who had a passion for street-style photography, at times chasing down the likes of Bob Marley for the perfect shot.

The family moved stateside soon after, and settled in Stone Mountain, where Winn picked up a camera of her own in high school. Her style, even then, leaned toward the plainspoken. “Honest,” she calls it now. “Sincere” — an eye trained on “the humanity and the regalness” in whoever sits for her.

But picking up a camera and claiming the life of an artist were two different things. It would take decades before Winn let herself do the second one.

Winn’s own “becoming era” took its time arriving. As a former military wife, she’d grown accustomed to a life with its own schedule and decorum. There were expectations, spoken and not, about how a woman should show up. Somewhere along the way, she doubled down on that more prescribed version of herself, no matter who was watching.

As a commercial photographer, her work for actors, entrepreneurs and brands who trusted her with their image was conventionally successful. But there’s a difference between being good at photography and embodying the life of a creative — and Winn was feeling the pull.

When her marriage ended, she was 42 and full of self-doubt. “I’d look at all these 20-year-olds with cameras doing all these things, and I’d think to myself, look how far they’ve gotten. I’ve just been hustling for over 15 years and I’m just fed up.”

So she gave herself one last shot at starting something purely creative, on her own terms and in her own time. Starting small and modestly, she challenged herself to photograph 20 Black women over 40 and self-publish a booklet.

The first person she called was Joy Marshall, a friend and caregiver looking after her own mother. Winn asked if she’d be willing to sit for a portrait and chat about Joy’s life. “Whatever you want, let’s go,” Joy told her. “Who should I sit with next?” was Winn’s follow-up.

When her marriage ended, Bessie Akuba Winn was 42 and full of self-doubt. So she gave herself one last shot at starting something purely creative, on her own terms and in her own time. (Jason Getz/AJC)

One woman said yes, then recommended a friend or a cousin, until a few became a following. Winn found herself photographing subjects in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles. Within a year, she’d photographed 107 women.

Somewhere around the 20th, she photographed actor, director and content creator Terri J. Vaughn.

“The sessions themselves were no more than 45 minutes,” Winn said, “but the trust and the exchange of energy I had with every single one of these women — I know all of their names by heart.” By the end of her own session, Vaughn asked Winn how else she could help bring the idea to life.

“I thought to myself, ‘This so authentically is who she is, and she just made it art,’” said Vaughn. “I wanted be a part of helping her amplify what she was doing because it so spoke to me.”

That session became a partnership, with Vaughn adding introductions, strategy and encouragement to Winn’s eye and vision.

Vaughn got to see the finished portraits and read the other women’s stories for the first time during a preview party. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, me too,’” she said. “I was so stupid, too … I could have said that then, too. I feel that way, too.”

More notable names sat for Winn’s camera, too — actors Vanessa Bell Calloway and Essence Atkins; jeweler Simone Smith; media personality Bevy Smith; Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms; and cultural critic Yaba Blay.

A pop-up exhibit in Atlanta around International Women’s Day this year drew more than 450 guests and was sponsored by textured hair care brand The Doux, whose co-founder, Maya Smith, had sat for Winn also. That same day, Georgia’s House of Representatives commended “Our Kind of Women” by name, lawmakers acknowledging how far a self-published booklet had traveled.

The book that followed put caregivers next to celebrities, mothers next to entrepreneurs, women born across the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, each answering some version of the same question: What does it mean to start over, on your own terms, after 40?

It launches Sept. 30, with a signing party Oct. 11 at Ambient + Studio at 585 Wells St. SW in Atlanta in partnership with Village Books.

“It took me being 46 years old to both capture and provide this experience,” Winn said. “There is no way I could have approached these women and created the space needed with a 30-year-old mind. I could not have done this at 27, 28, 29.”

Her vision is continuing to evolve, too. A book about Black men is in the works for early next year, and this October she heads back to her birth country to produce a Ghanaian counterpart to “Our Kind of Women.”

Ask Winn what she wants people to take from the book the first time they open it, and she laughs, then sighs, like the question caught her somewhere she wasn’t expecting.

“I want them to see themselves as they flip through the pages,” she said, “no matter what age they are. We just have to slow down and look closely enough, because all of us are each other’s mirrors.”