Judith Black is an American photographer. She was born in 1945 in Salina, Kansas, and grew up in Illinois. She has lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1979.
She studied photography at MIT and received a Master of Science in Visual Studies in 1981. There she found her strongest subject close to home: her four children and her partner. She is known for large format photographs made on Polaroid Type 55 film.
Black taught at Wellesley College from 1987 to 2010 and led the photography area. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Harvard Art Museums.
Her books include Pleasant Street (STANLEY/BARKER, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award, and Vacation (2021). Where the Light Came In (STANLEY/BARKER, 2025) gathers every photograph she made of one armchair in her Cambridge apartment in 1980 and 1981. The book was edited by Rachel and Greg of STANLEY/BARKER.
