The late 1930s image by Eliot Elisofon shows Zack Brown taking a picture of two dapper African-American men on a Harlem street. It challenged the then-dominant view of black urban life, focusing on dignity instead of suffering, self-possession instead of defeat, happiness instead of sorrow. Mr. Elisofon’s picture also reminds us of the powerful role of photography in African-American life, how the medium — and black photographers — helped reshape the image of a people.

This evocative photograph appears in “Through the African American Lens,” the first in a four-volume series, “Double Exposure” (NMAAHC/Giles), devoted to the collection of more than 15,000 photographs compiled by the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

Serving as an introduction to the collection, the volume will be followed by others on the civil rights movement and African-American women this summer. The African-American museum will open a companion exhibition next month at its temporary gallery in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Working closely with Deborah Willis, whose pioneering work in the 1980s gave rise to the field of African-American photographic history, the museum has amassed a world-class collection. When it opens its new building in 2016, the museum will employ photography, as the curator Rhea L. Combs noted, to tell the story of how “African-Americans have long found agency through the power of the lens,” from 19th-century daguerreotypes to present-day digital images.

The work in “Through the African American Lens” is compelling and historic: an early carte-de-visite of Sojourner Truth, an artifact that underscores her understanding of photography as a medium of self-expression and promotion; a stark image of a slave pen in Alexandria, Va., taken at the dawn of the Civil War; a panoramic view of the 1927 Mississippi River flood; Leonard Freed’s jubilant photo of demonstrators signing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington; and Mariana Cook’s casual portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama, taken 12 years before he would become president.

Bolstered by decades of scholarship and critical thinking about race and photography, and their intertwined relationship, the book gives new insights to many images. Take, for example, a picture by Jack Manning originally published in a 1940 Look magazine article on the social and economic injustices experienced by African-Americans in Harlem. The text and photographs, taken by members of the Harlem Document Group of New York’s Photo League, mostly focused on the negative and the despairing.

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Manning’s picture — of tenants gathered on fire escapes — was originally accompanied by a caption that summed up their plight: “An Elks parade brought these hundreds of Negroes from their packed apartments to dramatize the worst housing problem in New York.” Ultimately, the work of the Harlem Document, laudable but also dogmatic in its commitment to exposing racial injustice, largely ignored the optimism and cultural richness of a community that thrived despite adversity.

Seventy-five years later, “Through the African American Lens” reinterpreted the image, which in hindsight appears euphoric rather than dispiriting. The photograph depicts an event that celebrates “pride and citizenship,” a new caption noted, as thousands of residents acknowledge a group modeled on the Elks and formed as a “separate African American organization when blacks were repeatedly denied participation in white fraternal organizations.”

This reinterpretation affirms that photographs — instantaneous representations of a specific time and place — are not absolute truths. A picture can tell diverse, even contradictory, stories, mitigated first by the photographer’s point of view and later by how it is contextualized and interpreted. It is in this sense that the book series’s title, “Double Exposure,” infers multiple meanings.

On the one hand, as Ms. Combs wrote, “Double Exposure” alludes to W. E. B. Du Bois’ historic notion of double consciousness, the extent to which African-Americans, caught between the promise of freedom and equality and the reality of racism and segregation, struggled with a multifaceted conception of themselves. As Du Bois observed, black people inevitably felt a sense of “twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

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But as one absorbs the book’s images and accompanying texts, one senses another implication in its title: the volatility of photographic meaning. Each phase in the struggle for racial equality and justice has yielded different emphases and points of view, not only about resistance and protest, but also about how African-Americans have been represented and have represented themselves. Similarly, the goal of the national African-American museum in building its collection has been twofold: to recover and preserve important photographs — many lost, ignored, or undervalued — and to provide the interpretation necessary to elucidate their complexity.

“The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves,” wrote James Baldwin in 1961, as the civil rights movement was reaching its apex, “but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.”

There is no question that the camera played a vital role in achieving this goal. “Through the African American Lens” explores the ways it has provided a pathway to freedom, helping to liberate the story of black life from the myths that have distorted its meaning, erased its nuances and denied its joy.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.

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