Black Box: A Photographic Memoir by Dona Ann McAdams

“I feel wonder, sadness, delight, awe, tenderness, envy, to name a few of the ways I am meeting up with Dona Ann McAdams’ astonishingly rich and utopian army of small moments alongside her elegant and swift kind of poem-notes that muse alongside these photographs . . . Speaking of eyes, I can’t over-state my gratitude for Dona Ann McAdams’. She’s really got a pair.”
—Eileen Myles, poet and writer

Black Box, a memoir by award-winning American photographer Dona Ann McAdams, combines fifty years of black and white photography with the photographer’s own short lyric texts she calls “ditties.” The book brings together McAdams’ striking historical images with personal reflections that read like prose-poems. Her photographs, taken between 1974 and 2024, document astonishing moments and people across decades of American life.



Since 1975 McAdams has used a Leica M2 to witness and shape the world around her. She once called herself a “collage artist who works with time and light” and her dedication to analog photography is matched by her commitment to community. Over the decades McAdams has brought photography into small, underserved communities—everywhere from the South Bronx to Southern Appalachia—empowering people in adult homes, shelters, mountain towns, and horse tracks to take and make their own photographs.

McAdams is famous, Joanna Howard writes in her afterword, for her uncanny ability “to be at the right place at the right time to document resistance, protest, and empowered agency across four or five decades of American culture.” For McAdams, the personal is political. She’s captured moments of her community’s history from the Queer Liberation Movement, the Culture Wars, and the Performance Art scene of the 1980s and 1990, to artist intellectual acquaintances like Angela Davis, Meredith Monk, and Maurice Sendak, and a host of others whose paths she crossed, including Harvey Milk, David Bowie, David Wojnarowicz, and John Malkovich. The book also features a prophetic, never-before published photograph of the twin towers on the morning of 9/11.



Black Box is rich in lyricism; a leitmotif of horses literally run throughout the book. “I was born in the Year of the Horse,“ McAdams opens her memoir, “and so I wanted to be one.”

Her connection to animals, particularly horses, blossom from early childhood to late adulthood. In 2005 she became a licensed hot walker at the historic Saratoga Race Course in order to better understand horses and the workers who cared for them. “Dawn was the best time of day,” she writes. “People came from all walks of life. Grooms and trainers, exercise riders, cooks. They spoke many different languages, but shared one: horse. The backstretch became my second home. It reminded me of the theater, only the performers were horses and the stage was big and round.”

The title Black Box ties together themes throughout the memoir. McAdams repeatedly references boxes—a box of her mother’s black diet pills, the boxes her father packaged at his job. The glass box of a gas station, a phone booth, the black box of the theater, a darkroom, a camera obscura; and finally, like the device that records accidents after they happen, the black box of the book itself, an object of beauty, memory, and time.



Dona Ann McAdams
Dona Ann McAdams has been making photographs for fifty years, her work exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The International Center for Photography, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among other places.

Her books include Black Box: A Photographic Memoir (Saint Lucy Books, 2024) and Caught in the Act (Aperture, 1996). She is the recipient of a Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, an Obie and Bessie Award for her performance photography, and grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Arts Council.

She lives on a goat farm in Vermont.