Growing up in Boston, in the late 1970s, we saw Black motherhood as insepa-rable from Black Glamour. Our mother, Volora, a young R&B and jazz singer, and model had two types of photographs in our apartment, professional photographs of herself stored in a black leather portfolio with riveted han-dles and color polaroid images taken by our father, which lived in our family albums. As the older sister, I adored a color photograph of our mother and our aunt, our father’s sister, Annette, modeling together, side by side. I’d return to the image over and over again, sometimes sharing with Scheherazade, and together we’d stare at their slightly smiling faces to understand the magical process of Black women defining their own beauty.As the younger sister, my favorite image was a photograph of our mother seven months pregnant with me as she gazed directly into the camera play-fully twirling one of the golden woven ribbon braids in her hair. As early as four years old, I would whisper to Salamishah about this image right before we went to bed, and created my own fairytale in which we imagined our mother nesting and eagerly awaiting my birth. I immediately recognized the power of being able to tell the story of who we are, and who we could become, in pictures.We were lucky that we had those family albums, and had the opportunity to press our tiny fingers against the padded album covers or delicately loosen those stuck together pages that sounded like sparklers going off when you tried to turn them. Image after image, we found slightly faded but beautiful portraits of our mother sitting stylishly in the iconic wicker chair with her hair beautifully braided.