About

Molly Rogers writes on the history and theory of photography. Her work employs a variety of literary forms, including narrative history, essay and memoir.

Her first book, Delia’s Tears (Yale, 2010), is a narrative history about a group of daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women. The work examines the intersections of photography, early anthropological science, and the politics of race in America during the antebellum era. The editors of Booklist named Delia’s Tears “one of the best titles published in 2010,” and the judges of the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards “highly commended” the work. In 2015, Dazed magazine calld Delia’s Tears one of ten “photography books that shook up society.” The University of Warwick awarded Molly a PhD for the contribution Delia’s Tears makes to historiography.

Molly co-edited (with Ilisa Barbash and Deborah Willis) To Make Their Own Way in the World (Aperture / Peabody Museum Press, 2020), for which she also wrote the introduction. This collection of essays and creative interventions builds upon the scholarship she pioneered in Delia’s Tears. In 2021, To Make Their Own Way in the World won the Historical Book Award at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France.

In support of her research and writing, Molly was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow with the Library Company and the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Philadelphia. She has also held fellowships with the Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina; The Writers’ Institute, CUNY Graduate Center; and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Molly’s personal writing includes the essay “House of Fear,” published by The Colorado Review in 2021 and named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2022.

Currently, Molly is writing Empty Rooms, a Cold War memoir told through the history and theory of photography. The images discussed in Empty Rooms—whether printed, projected, remembered or imagined—are used as source material, as if they were messages from the past written in an unfamiliar language. Empty Rooms engages with the work of Diane Arbus, Roland Barthes, Duane Michals, Marcel Proust and August Sander, among other writers and photographers, exploring the entanglements of word and image, art and vernacular photography, past and present.

Molly resides in Queens, New York.