Pictures with Purpose explores images from the NMAAHC’s collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography. The volume looks at how early photographs of and by African Americans were circulated and used, and considers their meaning, for the sitter, for the photographer, and for the owner of the photograph. Particularly significant is how African Americans used photography to shape their image within and beyond their communities.

Essays include: Foreword by Lonnie Bunch; The Social Lives of Photographs by Laura Coyle and Michèle Gates Moresi; and Vernacular Photography: A Plurality of Purposes by Tanya Sheehan.