The upcoming Forum on Contemporary Photography is organized in conjunction with the publication of two highly anticipated volumes: Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, the first title in Aperture’s new Vision & Justice Series, and The Unseen Truth by Sarah Lewis. Race Stories anthologizes a collection of short essays that explore the intersections of photography, race, and visual culture by award-winning historian, curator, and critic Maurice Berger (1956–2020). In The Unseen Truth, Lewis offers a probing historical analysis of the fictions that have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in the United States. Framed by Berger and Lewis’s ever urgent contributions to thinking about race and representation in the US, this Forum will consider the role of cultural criticism in the work of examining social justice, equity, and democracy.