Billie Holiday is beaming in a 1956 photograph as she gazes at singer Billy Eckstine. Her trademark flower is pinned behind her left ear.

Pages later, a handsome Muhammad Ali and a suited James Brown are laughing as they stand together in a convertible Cadillac during a parade in 1960s Chicago.

And in one of the last gems in Deborah Willis' 15th book, Posing Beauty: African American Images From the 1890s to the Present, a woman is placing the Miss Sepia crown on the winner of the 1958 African American beauty pageant in Philadelphia.

Willis, a native Philadelphia photographer and New York University professor, says the black-and-white images in her 233-page softcover provide more than a fashionable walk down memory lane.

The book, she says, is a study of African American beauty. But you won't find among her pages a politically charged debate about the black aesthetic - historically characterized by discussions of complexion, hair texture, and social standing.

This interchange is more reflective, its images quiet.

"I just noticed something lacking in the photo [collections] that chronicled our lives," Willis said last week from a hotel in Boston, where she was scheduled to speak about her book, released in October. Willis will talk here Dec. 8 at the Free Library.

Posing Beauty is like a family photo album. Both remarkable and unremarkable events are photographed, and it is in these pictures that an inner beauty is captured.

"In every photo selected, I'm able to see the moment where the beauty intended by the subject is captured by the photographer," Willis said.

Photographs of civil rights figures Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, as well as author Zora Neale Hurston and millionaire Madam C.J. Walker, are included. More contemporary images of Denzel Washington, Aretha Franklin, and Lil Kim also are part of Willis' story of beauty.

But Willis, a scholar of African American photography, also culled images by nationally known photographers Gordon Parks and Charles "Teenie" Harris of Pittsburgh, who were known for documenting regular people in regular situations. Several photographs from the Charles Blockson collection housed at Temple University were included, too.

It's the photographs of the non-famous that keep me flipping through. These images didn't make the cover of Life, or even Ebony, but they capture the soulfulness of everyday life. My favorites: a photo of men in floppy newsboy caps crowding around a new car in Virginia during the 1930s, and another of four girlfriends, clad in bathing suits, doing their best Diana Ross-and-the-Supremes pose in Atlantic City.

It's like I'm back snooping through my grandmother's drawer and finding black-and-white photographs of my grandparents, my mom, and my uncle in early-1950s Brooklyn. To me, these pictures merely depicted my family. Beauty wasn't part of it.

And this raised a question for Willis: How different would the black experience be if African Americans ever considered these real-life images beautiful?

"I'm not trying to idealize the white perspective or the black perspective," Willis said. "I just want to look at the notion of how we have been posed. What effect has that had on us?"

Oftentimes the fashion industry has left out blackness in its definition of beauty, and in the same way, when African American culture chooses how to document its story, it has emulated the mainstream rather than incorporate more diverse images. In African Americans' desire to be "seen," Willis says, they see beauty through a distorted lens.

The photos Willis has chosen fill in those gaps.

Willis grew up in North Philly; her mother was a hairdresser and her father was a police officer who had a tailoring business on the side. She started taking pictures when she was a child, and always was interested in fashion and body image as it related to African American self-identity.

One of her first books was The Black Female Body: A Photographic History. Before landing a job as a professor at NYU, she was a curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. This month she released a book she co-authored called Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs. In it, Willis writes a scholarly foreword about Obama's impact on American society.

Willis decided to concentrate on Posing Beauty while she was being treated for breast cancer several years ago.

"People responded differently to me when they saw my bald head," Willis said. "Did that mean there was not beauty in that? That is what I wanted to explore."

Contact fashion writer Elizabeth Wellington at 215-854-2704 or ewellington@phillynews.com.