There is an air of legend surrounding Deana Lawson, and indeed even the artist herself describes her early relationship to photography as “mythological.” Born and raised in Rochester, New York—the birthplace of Kodak, where her mother worked as a secretary—Lawson had a photographer father and an aunt, Sylvia, who was one of the first black female ophthalmologists in Upstate New York. “That whole relationship to sight and seeing—it was the ether that informed my work,” says Lawson, 39.
In 1997, at 18, Lawson began her formal...