I was 10-years old when I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, wishing for an invisibility
cloak that same year for my birthday. I remember thinking to myself how amazing it would be to just
observe strangers during their unguarded moments. As I grew older, I started to realise that the invisi-
bility cloak was a skill instead of a physical object. Something that Marilyn Nance was gifted with. “I
have this cloak of invisibility that I put on,” she says in an interview with National Public Radio.
During family gatherings, religious ceremonies and daily life, Nance would always be with her camera,
capturing the ordinary working class Blacks during their unguarded moments. It was when she started
comparing these pictures that she took to contemporary photographs, she became aware of her histor-
ical and geographical identity in the US.
Born in New York in 1953, Nance grew up in Brooklyn where she studied journalism at New York
University from 1971 to 1972. But her mother was from Pratt City, a black suburb of Birmingham,
Alabama. Being surrounded by Black characters daily made her conscious of her identity and the
issues faced by the Black community in America. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Brook-
lyn’s Pratt Institute, the first in her family to go to art school.
Being a graduate in the 70s, with the increasing awareness in the lack of African-American photogra-
phers in mainstream publications, paired with equal opportunity laws, helped Nance find work. She
started documenting Black Indians in New Orleans, an African village in South Carolina and the first
Black church in America through photographs. Her invisibility cloak was not the only reason for pow-
erful images. She had psychic powers that told her where something important was about to take
place. It was this power that helped her capture the photo of supporters carrying pictures of Malcolm
X and Martin Luther King. “It’s like a gift of vision.”
With her powers combined, she was the finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Pho-
tography for her work on African-American spiritual culture in America.