The video caused a firestorm when it was first uploaded to Facebook. Some commenters assumed that Lawson was white, while defenders of the images, who saw the show as a sign of progress at a museum, pointed out that Lawson is African-American. On the museum’s Facebook page, a commenter named J Cameron Bayne wrote , “The Deana Lawson exhibition is NOT a ‘Representation of African American Life.’” In Bayne’s opinion, the Lawson show is “a racist insult” that narrowly represents the artist’s personal experience in a way that would traumatize any black child who saw “such visceral images.” The criticism echoes the outrage felt when the Whitney Museum showed white artist Dana Schutz’s controversial painting Open Casket, a gruesome depiction of the body of Emmett Till. The African-American artist Parker Bright staged a one-man protest in front of it wearing a t-shirt reading "BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE".

The highly stylized and staged pictures in the Lawson show were intended to depict how black men, women, and children living on the margins throughout the African diaspora might appear if they were considered and celebrated. They were meant to elevate a different kind of black experience in a space that has historically preferred exhibiting respectable, middle class, or freedom-fighting depictions of black life.

The Lawson images upset all of that, critiquing not only the kinds of black representation we have grown accustomed to as a culture but also the very history of photography. Images like Kings, of black men posing at a party, and Eternity, of a nude, curvy black woman standing in her living room, exist in a grey area that should make an audience question them. Are they appropriated from a black family photo album? Are they _National Geographic_-style ethnographic studies? Are they simply portraits of the ways her subjects want to be seen? Because Lawson picks the people and the poses, are they a kind of self-portrait of the artist? Why does she photograph black men one way and women another? The fact that you can’t pin down, at first glance, how and why Lawson produces the images gives them power and calls into question our romanticizing the still image, our wanting poor black people to go away, and the problematic history of suggesting a single picture can frame an entire culture.