The final product is a mosaic of textured portraits, not a two-dimensional description of downtrodden laborers and evil overseers.

When Hollywood portrayed Negroes almost exclusively as fat black mammies or shuffling sambos, The Defender and its cousins offered a textured portrait of Bronzeville, high and low.

"The book is an incredibly rich textured portrait of Diana and all the royals, and it's our belief that readers will be anxious for more."

All these details provide a richly textured portrait of the place, but without any obvious message or rhetoric.

He began with six Ives songs, setting the scene with the nostalgic "Old Home Day," then presenting a textured portrait of youthful innocence.

In his new work, Mr. Ofili juxtaposed two richly textured portraits of a man and a woman, turning their noble poses into something more flirtatious.

It is also a richly textured quasi-documentary portrait of a rural Muslim society in which the people display a remarkable resilience in the face of catastrophe.

Although Howard and Judith Sacks offer an intriguing and textured portrait of the life of a black family in the 19th-century North, they have a more ambitious agenda.

Can the public eventually expect textured portraits of these people, many of whom have dedicated over 20 years of their lives to helping women and their unborn children?

Throughout the book, Ms. Karcher views Child within the context of her own 20th-century concerns and standards, rather than offering a textured portrait of the way Child herself viewed her world.