revolutionary normalcy.
Thirteen years photographing Black life on an ordinary Tuesday — the day the archive never bothered to keep.
the archive kept our worst days and our best days. it threw away the Tuesday.
Nobody fights to preserve an ordinary afternoon. That is exactly why it goes first.
My grandparents were sharecroppers. There are records of them — land records, labor records, a line in a census. What there aren't are pictures. Not my grandmother laughing on a Sunday. Not anybody's kids just playing in the yard.
The camera came for us when we were suffering and when we were exceptional. It skipped everything in between. And everything in between is where the life was.
So I spent thirteen years with film cameras — some older than I am — photographing the in-between. A girl eating ice cream in Brooklyn. Double dutch in a warehouse on a Saturday. Nobody making history. Everybody just being.
I'm printing it a third time because the ground moved underneath it. Books are coming off shelves. History is being edited out of classrooms. Neighborhoods are being emptied out. The photographs haven't changed. What they mean has.
Nobody published this. I did, three times.
This collection captures the beauty of Black humanity, which is as unacknowledged as it is undeniable.
TranslationJAY-Z and Steve Stoute
248 pages. no one in them is making history.
Shot on film across Havana, Nashville, New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit. Nothing retouched, nothing staged, nothing reshot — you get the frame once.
built to be held, not scrolled.
Printed on plush uncoated stock on a Heidelberg offset press, because a photograph made on film deserves ink on paper. It opens flat. It gets fingerprints. That's the point.
- Pages
- 248
- Photographs
- Shot 2007–2021 on film
- Cities
- Havana · Nashville · New York · Atlanta · Philadelphia · Detroit
- Foreword
- stic of dead prez
- Photo edit
- Bill Shapiro — former editor-in-chief, LIFE
- Publisher
- 7 Media International — independent
- Press
- Heidelberg offset, uncoated
- Collections
- Mint Museum · City of Atlanta
three runs. no publisher.
Every copy of this book exists because somebody bought the one before it. The first printing paid for the second. The second paid for this one. There is no house behind it, no distributor taking a cut, no sales team. Just a press invoice and a list of people who wanted it.
Printed on a Heidelberg offset press on uncoated stock, because a photograph made on film deserves ink on paper. It costs more to make this way. That is the whole argument.
thirteen years, one frame at a time.
Ken West was born in the historic Bordeaux neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee in 1971. From an early age he was fascinated by the world of storytelling that surrounded him. Weekly haircuts in Oprah Winfrey’s father’s barbershop and frequent trips to his grandparents farm first exposed him to the power of the synthesis of image and story in both rural and city life.
He is the author of The Beauty of Everyday Thangs: Documentary Portraits of Mindfulness and Black Revolutionary Normalcy, the culmination of a 13-year project to capture the candid realities of beauty within seven cities. While the book is focused on the everyday, it features appearances by legendary creative icons Melvin Van Peebles, Stic of Dead Prez, and British actor and musician Tricky.
Ken has studied at the University of Paris, 7 and holds graduate degrees from The Ohio State University and New York University.
artist statement
My work is created in praise of common things. It is my belief that the common, no matter its origin, is frequently the seed of something spectacular. However, those common things don’t come with a label that speaks to the certainty or magnitude of their greatness.
At my core I am a documentarian in still and moving image. I capture people and things as they are, not how we wish they were or how they will ultimately be. I live on both ends of the camera in a recursive loop of mindful appreciation, curiosity, and reverence of my subjects.
My work is grounded in a passion for mindfulness and the power of the documentary image. The images I capture are of passing, everyday moments that, at their best, add to our seemingly endless mental reservoirs of fear, irony, beauty, confusion, hope, etcetera that give life its individualized texture and meaning.
Written in Berlin, Germany
it has already been read this way.
Western history does not celebrate the magic of Black moments, the beauty of the normal. Ken West's astute snapshots of daily life are changing that.
Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD
Chief curator, The Mint Museum
This book celebrates the hard, the beautiful, and the brilliant in us; it is a love letter to Black people.
Jonell Logan
Executive director, League of Creative Interventionists
At once emotional, revelatory and sanguine. I will use a host of these images in my film classes.
Booker T. Mattison
Filmmaker, author, professor
Exhibited at the Consulate General of France in Atlanta. Held in the permanent collections of the Mint Museum and the City of Atlanta.
Exhibition and collection history
2019 – present
It's a big-hearted book.
Bill Shapiro
Former editor-in-chief, LIFE — edited and sequenced this book
the third printing is shipping now.
Orders go out within two business days. Signed copies are limited to what I can sign by hand — once they're spoken for, the rest ship unsigned.
Pay now, or pay later in four with Klarna, Affirm or Afterpay.
Collector edition — signed and numbered, from the hand-signed part of the run. Print + book — one signed archival pigment print from the series, paired with the book.
Not ready to order? Get the one email that goes out when the signed run is gone, and nothing else.
No publisher. No distributor. Two printings sold through on word of mouth, and this is the third. Signed copies come out of the same run — once they're spoken for, the rest ship unsigned.
some of these are meant to hang.
A small number of images from the book are released as signed archival prints, in editions. The next release opens in the fall.
Archival prints: 12" or 15" on the longest side, depending on image proportion.
for the shelves that keep things.
A book about what the archive discarded belongs in the archive. Institutional and bulk orders are handled directly.
Libraries
Catalog record, ISBN and invoicing available. Standard institutional discount on orders of ten or more. Published independently by 7 Media International; full catalogue record and ISBN supplied with every institutional order.
Museums & shops
Wholesale terms for museum stores and independent booksellers. Held in the permanent collections of the Mint Museum and the City of Atlanta.
Schools & programs
Classroom sets with an educator guide. Used in film and visual culture courses.
Corporate & gifting
Bulk gifting for employee resource groups and cultural programs, with optional signing and a custom bookplate.
Private sessions
An Ordinary Tuesday — a three-hour private walk and live edit for up to twelve, books included. For boards, donor cultivation and cultural programming. Atlanta and travelling.