The earliest photographs (some published in “Tender” and others currently on display at Higher Pictures, in the exhibition “Carla Williams: Circa 1985”) show a young artist vibrating with a messy creativity. Some photos are overexposed and chemically stained, others underdeveloped and marked by bends in the prints and finger smudges. “I was a bad technician, but I was a curious technician,” Williams said. Many of the photographs are reminiscent of Man Ray’s nude works, with their secretive compositions and poetic angles. You can also see nods to the classical, formalist nude photographs of Edward Weston in images like “Untitled (butt)” (1989-90), which depicts Williams’s bare rear end illuminated against a black backdrop. “Untitled,” from October of 1986, showing Williams seated in her underwear, facing away from the camera, reminds me of Weston’s studies of the curves of seashells.

Williams was learning in school about these technically gifted white photographers, and taking from them what she needed. As was so often the case, though, she was not being taught the work of any Black photographers; the art that she studied in class rarely even included Black people as subjects. Still, Williams became aware of Black photographers’ work. She cites the influence of Roy DeCarava, and in particular the rich, elevated, and intentional darkness of his silver-gelatin prints. But the style she developed also places her in a lineage of contemporary artists who were using self-portraiture to critique or slyly defy art history’s erasure of Black women. Renee Cox’s image “Hottentot Venus” feels directly in conversation with Williams’s “Untitled (profile #1),” which nods to Sarah Baartman, the African woman who was objectified, subjugated, and exhibited around Europe in the eighteen-hundreds under the name of Hottentot Venus. Carrie Mae Weems’s 1997 series “Not Manet’s Type” is surely in dialogue with Williams’s “Untitled (tired),” showing her on her bed, tousling her hair with her eyes closed.

In grad school, at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, Williams continued photographing herself, and the work matured. One of my favorite images from that time, the haunting “Untitled (face in light),” evokes the image of Billie Holiday, calling the late singer forth like a glorious, glowing spectre. But, after school, Williams struggled to find a place in the professional art world. She was resistant to the idea of selling her prints. “I had this grandiose notion that art was about ideas and that ideas should be shared freely,” she said. She submitted work for shows and was routinely rejected. She recalls that when her photographs were accepted into one exhibit, the organizers lost certain pieces and damaged others. All the while, Williams was struggling to make ends meet. “I remember thinking, I’m not doing this,” she told me.