Tender is artist Carla Williams's first monograph. Made privately between 1984 and 1999 and kept largely to herself for more than thirty years, its images form an intimate, comprehensive self-portrait of a young Black queer woman exploring the realm of her own possibilities. Williams began making the black-and-white and colour portraits in Tender at eighteen, while studying photography at Princeton, seeking to create photographs in her own image. Her mind was filled equally with canonical images from the medium's male-dominated history and the posing women she had discovered in her father's pornography collection during her youth. Using her own body, Williams made portraits she had never seen before. Working with 35mm film and 4×5 Polaroid Type 55 instant film, she used near-immediate results to keep experimenting with her expression and form. In a tender act of communion with herself, every version of the artist is on display: provocative, playful, sensual, gentle, powerful, petty, glamorous, sad and funny. Tender's photographs are alive with the raw energy of a young artist on the threshold of adulthood and her own emerging sexual identity. The book includes essays by the artist and scholar Dr Mireille Miller-Young.
 
Winner of the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award.