SESSION TWO
Embedded Files
Newsweek , 3 August 1964, Photo: Roy Carava.
Newsweek Magazine Cover, 1964
"It was the first of the "long hot summers," the urban uprisings of the 1960s. Across the country, black youth rebelled against the racism that shaped their lives. Often the spark was a police assault on an African-American citizen.
That was the case in Harlem. An off-duty policeman shot and killed a 15-year-old black teenager in a mostly-white section of the city. Protests in Harlem, demanding that the policeman be charged with murder, erupted into violence when police confronted the crowd.
Newsweek's highly sensationalized story describing the events dominated the issue of 3 August 1964. The magazine's editors needed a strong photo for the cover, but the white photographers that it relied on were afraid to go uptown. What to do?"
STUDY QUESTIONS
What was the response by a group of photographers in New York to uncertain job assignments in the marketplace? How did the formation, the functions and longevity of the Kamoinge Workshop differ from SPIRAL ? To what can we attribute its longevity? How did the Kamoinge Workshop influence the work of individuals such as Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper and Ming Smith and vice versa ? Commonalities in the work of these three artists? To what extent did the Kamoinge Workshop affect photography becoming recognized as "visual art"?
INJUSTICE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE FORMATION OF A COMMUNE, THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP (1963)
(Group named for a Kikuyu concept used by the Kenyan leader Joma Kenyatta, translated as " group of people acting together.")
ARTISTS OF NOTE: ROY DECARAVA , LOUIS DRAPER and MING SMITH
Click on the image above for the "background' cover story.
INJUSTICE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE FORMATION OF A COMMUNE, THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP
"My Father Was a Black Photojournalist When There Were So Few, A Memoir in Captions" by Alsha Sabatini Sloan, Daughter of Lester Sloan, Race/Related NY Times, Nov. 10, 2021
My Father Was a Black Photojournalist When There Were So Few
My Father Was a Black Photojournalist When There Were So Few
The writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan and her father, a photojournalist, wrote a book together, “Captioning the Archives.”
Lester Sloan, second from left, photographing Sandra Day O’Connor in Arizona in 1981.
Click on the image to read "A Memoir in Captions" by Alsha Sabatini Sloan, daughter of Lester Sloan, Race/Related NY Times, Nov. 10, 2021.
INJUSTICE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE FORMATION OF A COMMUNE, THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP, cont.
"Working Together : The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop", YouTube, Feb. 26, 2021 (6.28 min.).
Click on the right to view the video and read about some members of the Kamoinge Workshop.
INJUSTICE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE FORMATION OF A COMMUNE, THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP, cont.
"Take Beautiful Pictures of Our People" by Siddhartha Mitter, NY Times published Dec. 22, 2020, updated Dec. 23, 2020.
Click on the right to learn more about the members of the Kamoinge Workshop.
An excerpt:
"For the group of African-American photographers who coalesced around 1963 to form Kamoinge, the answer to skewed portrayals of the community and scarce publishing opportunities was to get together, and do better.
“The reason we came together was to take pictures,” said Adger Cowans, who arrived in New York in 1960 after studying photography at Ohio University and a stint in the Navy. “It was about the actual photographic image, to take beautiful pictures of our people.”
Influential in Black photography circles, Kamoinge is little-known beyond. “Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop,” now at the Whitney Museum after originating at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, is the first museum show focused on the group since the 1970s - 1965.
Kamoinge is still active. It re-energized in the 1990s and has added new members regularly since then, for instance the photojournalists Ruddy Roye and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn. Whether part of the official group now or not, the elders describe the relationship as an enduring family. To be finally in the limelight, they said, is welcome and also bittersweet.
Below are images of work from the Whitney Museum show.
2. ‘Take Beautiful Pictures of Our People’ - The New York Times.pdf
A Reception at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in February for "Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop" reunited members, 2020.
Herman Howard's "Sweet as a Peach",1963, emphasized the community's energy.
Adger Cowans, "Malcolm Speaks", circa 1960- 1965.
Beuford Smith's "Boy on Swing, Lower East Side", from 1970, lends its subject shadowy weight.
INJUSTICE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE FORMATION OF A COMMUNE, THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP, cont.
'The Belated Celebration of the Kamoinge Workshop', Aperture, Jan. 14, 2021.
Click on the right to find our more about this celebration honoring the Kamoinge Workshop.
The introduction:
Going to see the exhibition Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I was reminded once again of the segregated histories of American cultural institutions, and of the ongoing struggle by people of color and other marginalized communities to achieve visibility and social justice. In recent years, museums have become battlegrounds over political representation and cultural narratives, and none more so than the Whitney. Given this heated context, it is easy to understand why all-too-white art museums are suddenly scrambling to stage exhibitions by Black artists.
See below work by Herbert Randall at the exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Nov. 21, 2020 -March 28, 2021.
Herbert Randall, Untitled (Palmers Crossing, Missisippi, 1964)
"Still, whatever the backpedaling cause, it is a revelatory thrill to see a full-scale museum presentation of work by artists associated with the rarely exhibited Kamoinge Workshop, an extraordinary collective of Black New York photographers started in 1963 as an active part of the Civil Right struggle and the emerging Black Arts Movement. The 140 black-and-white photographs shown in Working Together at the Whitney feature a muted, slow-burn politics. The small pictures are quiet, almost meditative, and they deliberately sidestep the confrontational images often associated with Black struggles for political and psychic freedoms. Instead, these various images, by a range of photographers with individual differences in style and approach, focus on one thing: capturing affirmative representations of African American people in all aspects of daily life."
Kamoinge's Collective Vision, Emily Raboteau, a conversation with Maaza Mengiste and Rachael Eliza Griffiths, The New York Review, Feb. 6, 2021
Anthony Barboza: Pensacola, Florida, 1966
"Together, we pored over the images arranged on the Whitney’s walls, considering the following: How have social concerns taken up by the workshop at its genesis developed over time? What do we stand to learn from Kamoinge’s original preoccupations and techniques for documenting the current moment, about Black visual representation, about pure aesthetics? Which of their themes anticipate our own?"
10-2 Kamoinge's Collective Vision _ by Emily Raboteau _ The New York Review of Books.pdfOPTIONAL READ JUSTICE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE FORMATION OF A COMMUNE, THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP, cont.
The Black Photographers Annual (A short-lived magazine was the essential venue for black photographers, paving the way for previously untold histories.) Carla William, aperture Archive, Summer 2016.
Click on the image on the right to learn more about the development of "The Black Photographers Annual"
An excerpt:
" It was in this environment, between 1973 and 1980, that in New York the Brooklyn-based photographer and editor Joe Crawford, with associate editor Joe Walker, published four volumes of 'The Black Photographers Annual" . Though a couple of more prominent journals had appeared—Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and the Society for Photographic Education’s exposure, which came along in 1972 and 1973, respectively—none had published work by black photographers prior to the Annual’s debut. Less a journal in its format than a softcover anthology, the initially self-financed Annual sought simply to promote and distribute the work of black photographers. As the writer and activist Clayton Riley stated in the introduction to its first issue, which followed a brief foreword written by the novelist Toni Morrison, the mission was to define “a new Blackness, real and strong as our history, pushing consciousness toward a new place—an understanding, a belief, the awareness of self... all new, perhaps, but ancient in concept.”Click on the image on the right to learn more about the development of "The Black Photographers Annual"
self-financed Annual sought simply to promote and distribute the work of black photographers. As the writer and activist Clayton Riley stated in the introduction to its first issue, which followed a brief foreword written by the novelist Toni Morrison, the mission was to define “a new Blackness, real and strong as our history, pushing consciousness toward a new place—an understanding, a belief, the awareness of self... all new, perhaps, but ancient in concept.
OPTIONAL READ JUSTICE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE FORMATION OF A COMMUNE, THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP, cont.
Celebrating the Grace of Black Women by Antwaun Sargent, NY Times, May 29, 2018. (Kamoinge’s new exhibit, “Black Women: Power and Grace,” at the National Arts Club in New York from May 28 to June 30, 2018)
Click on the right to learn more about a recent Kamoinge's exhibit celebrating black women.
An excerpt:
" Decades after “The Negro Woman,” that same motivation has inspired Kamoinge’s new exhibit, “Black Women: Power and Grace,” at the National Arts Club in New York from May 28 to June 30.(2018) “With this exhibition we are showing our love and appreciation to our mothers, wives and sisters,” said Russell Frederick, a co-organizer of the exhibition and Kamoinge’s vice president. “I think black women, who have mostly been objectified in the media, have actually made a major mark on society that really can’t be quantified but has gone unrecognized.”
2. Celebrating the Grace of Black Women - The New York Times.pdfARTISTS OF NOTE : ROY DECARAVA , LOUIS DRAPER and MING SMITH
# 1. ARTIST OF NOTE - ROY DECARAVA (1919 - 2009) born in Harlem
From MoMA by Swagato Chakravorty, Museum Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Media and Performance Art, 2016.
"Born in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1919, Roy DeCarava came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, when artistic activity and achievement among African Americans flourished across the literary, musical, dramatic, and visual arts. DeCarava did not take up photography until the late 1940s, after working in painting and making prints for the posters division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He used his camera to produce striking studies of everyday black life in Harlem, capturing the varied textures of the neighborhood and the creative efflorescence of the Harlem Renaissance. Resisting explicit politicization, DeCarava used photography to counter what he described as “black people...not being portrayed in a serious and artistic way.”1
Roy DeCarava, 'Mississippi freedom marcher', Washington, D.C., 1963, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
'On August 28, 1963, photographer Roy DeCarava attended the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In this striking photograph (above) DeCarava turned away from common displays of political demonstration—placards and crowds—to capture the confidence, interiority, and stoicism of a single marcher. DeCarava described this portrait, with its subtle gradations of gray and black, as representing “a beautiful black woman who was beautiful in her blackness….I wanted to pay homage to that person, that spirit.”
ROY DECARAVA, cont.
"Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, dies at 89" by Randy Kennedy, NY Times, Oct. 28, 2009
Click on the right to read an overview of the life of Roy DeCarava.
An excerpt:
“I do not want a documentary or sociological statement,” he wrote in his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he won in 1952, becoming the first black photographer to do so. His goal, he explained, was “a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.”
2 Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, Dies at 89 - The New York Times.pdfROY DECARAVA, cont.
"The Photographer Who Found His Power in Shades of Gray" , by Roberta Smith, NY Times (Art and Design), Oct. 10, 2019
Click on the right to read an overview of the life of Roy DeCarava and view some of his most famous works.
An excerpt:
" DeCarava’s work is itself the best of both worlds: visually rigorous yet incalculably sensitive to the human predicament and the psychology of everyday life, especially concerning but not limited to African-Americans. He studied painting and printmaking, before committing to the camera, which may have helped him enrich his new medium in terms of both appearance and meaning. DeCarava’s reputation began to grow in the early 1950s, based on his sympathetic portrayals of the residents of Harlem, where he was born in 1919 and raised by a single mother, and of the numerous musical luminaries pursuing blues or jazz, this country’s first modern art."
Below is work by Roy DeCarava.
2 The Photographer Who Found His Power in Shades of Gray - The New York Times.pdf
Roy De Carava's 'Progressive Labor', 1964
Roy DeCarava's "Pepsi", 1964
Roy DeCarava, 'Wall Street, Morning", 1960. "DeCarava's work encompasses an extraordinary range of shadowy tonalities, from deep charcoal to pale haze". ('The Photographer Who Found His Power in Shades of Gray')
ROY DECARAVA, cont.
OPTIONAL READ "Roy DeCarava Poetics of Blackness" by Hilton Als, The New Yorker, September 16, 2019.
Click on the right to read in more detail the life of Roy DeCarava. An excerpt:
An excerpt:
"The only child of a hardworking single Jamaican mother, he had learned young that a strong work ethic was the key to advancement. By the time he met Hughes, he had toiled for several years as an illustrator for an advertising firm. A skilled draftsman, painter, and printmaker, he had developed his various talents first at the now defunct Textile High School, on West Eighteenth Street, and then at the Cooper Union School of Art, the Harlem Community Art Center, and, in the mid-forties, the George Washington Carver Art School. During the years of his apprenticeship as an artist, DeCarava’s practice underwent a great transformation: the photographs he had begun taking as the foundation for his prints became his dominant mode of expression."
ROY DECARAVA, cont.
OPTIONAL READ Roy DeCarava in New York: "A Jazz Photographer in Subject and Technique" by Michael Irwin, Aug. 30, 2019.
Click on the right to read more about this aspect of Roy DeCarava's work:
"To call DeCarava a jazz photographer is not simply to refer to one of the artist's many subjects. Not only did the Harlem-born photographer capture intimate visions of the legends of jazz music and the American context from which they arose, but the very essence of his work reflects the underlying elements of jazz. The lifelong New Yorker's 35mm camera was his instrument, with which he played visual tunes that artistically expressed the pathos of life for African Americans in New York City and elsewhere."
Roy DeCarava, "Club Audience at Intermission", 1960
"How Roy DeCarava's jazz photographs captured the soul of Harlem and influenced a generation" by Chris May, VF (Vinyl Factory), Nov. 9, 2017,
An excerpt
"It was while shooting The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Sound I Saw that DeCarava perfected the two core signatures of his style – the use of available light rather than flash and an embrace of the dark tones that often resulted from that choice. In 1990, he talked about this approach in an interview with Ivor Miller published by the John Hopkins University Press. “I don’t try to alter light, which is why I never use flash,” said DeCarava. “I hate it with a passion because it obliterates what I saw. When I fall in love with something I see, when something interests me, it interests me in the context of the light that it’s in. So why should I try to change the light and what I see, to get this ‘perfect’ information-laden print? I don’t care about that. The reason why my photographs are so dark is that I take photographs everywhere, light or not. If I can see it, I will take a picture of it. If it’s dark, so be it. I take things as I find them because that’s the way I am and that’s the way I like them. When I went to a jazz club it wasn’t lit up like a T.V. studio. It was dark. I accept that.”
# 2. ARTIST OF NOTE - LOUIS H. DRAPER (b.1935) born in Virginia and moved to Harlem.
From MoMA by Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Dept of Photography, 2021.
“For some reason somebody had left a copy of The Family of Man on a bed. I lived in the dorm with four other people, none of whom owned up to it. So, I have no idea to this day who left that copy on my bed. But that was the first beginning of my photography education. I read it practically all night. Instead of studying for my exam, I read The Family of Man. I was just enthralled by that book.”1
Louis Draper recalled this memory from his days as a student at Virginia State College (now University). In 1953, he enrolled at the historically Black college in Petersburg, which was not far from his hometown of Richmond. He began working as a reporter for the school paper, and during that time Draper’s father, who was an amateur photographer himself, sent Louis his first camera. By 1956, Draper’s title at the paper had changed to cameraman. After his revelatory first experience with The Family of Man, a catalogue that accompanied the 1955 photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, he decided to leave school during his final semester and move to New York City to become a photographer. Once there, Draper enrolled in a photography workshop led by Harold Feinstein, and was mentored by W. Eugene Smith, one of the most prominent American photojournalists.
In 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York–based collective of Black photographers. Workshop members met regularly to discuss one another’s work, produced group portfolios, exhibitions, and publications, and mentored young people all over the city. Draper emerged as one of the group’s teachers, which began his long career as an educator (he worked in numerous teaching roles, including at Pratt Institute and Mercer County Community College). The collective aimed to “create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.”2 Kamoinge members wanted to avoid the racial stereotypes prevalent in the media and the violence that was typical of journalistic coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, working instead to represent their communities in a positive light."
LOUIS DRAPER, cont.
"Black on Black: Louis Draper Made His Subjects Visible" by Erina Duganna, Humanities, The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Winter 2021, Vol. 42, Number 1
Click on the right to read more about Louis Draper - his life and his work:
An excerpt:
"As a Black photographer working primarily during the civil rights era, Draper wanted to foreground his experiences as an African American. At the same time, Draper worried that doing so would result in his photographs being looked at as documents rather than as works of art.
Draper wanted his photographs to be appreciated for more than just their realism. He explains, in a typescript from 1986, “In my beginning years I was plagued by various questions about reality and how responsible I needed to be in depicting it.” In addressing this problem, Draper took inspiration from a credo by abstract artist Paul Klee: “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.” Throughout Draper’s career, this insight into the creative act of seeing remained a touchstone."
See below two works by Louis Draper.
Louis Draper, 'untitled' ( African - American laborer in New York City's Garment District.) 1965, "Not wanting to replicate negative stereotypes that overlooked the vitality and complexity of the African America. experience, Draper sought a different tactic. He did not depict these workers destitute or debased. Instead he emphasized their humanity."
Louis Draper,'Boy and H, Harlem', NY, c. 1961,
"...Much of this he accomplished in the darkroom. From Feinstein, Draper learned to use film development to turn a photographic negative into a print that reflects the artist’s creative vision. Understanding that photography is an imaginative, not imitative, medium, and therefore not limited to the transitory subject that lies in front of the camera, Draper used the darkroom tools of cropping as well as burning and dodging to transform his images into expressive works of art that, while tethered to the real, also transcended the medium’s documentary purposes."
LOUIS DRAPER, cont.
Fighting bigotry, dispelling stereotypes by Lauren Booker, Special to CNN, February 11, 2016
On a hot summer day in 1961, Louis Draper took his camera outside to snap this gleeful moment of kids playing in the shooting spray of a New York City fire hydrant. Although Draper died in 2002 and was not widely famous during his lifetime, his photography -- mostly of everyday African-Americans -- has gained him a newfound appreciation in recent years. (Below are three of Louis Draper's noted images. Click on the image below to view 12 other works by Louis Draper.)
One of Draper's recurring themes was the juxtaposition of human subjects with street signs, posters or graffiti. This image, "Girl and Cuba," was captured in Philadelphia in 1968.
Lou Draper's photographs of blacks in the streets of Harlem showed their dignity, grace and sense of pride. I'd never seen such beautiful photographs of ordinary black people," said photographer Shawn Walker in a 1987 interview with Ten 8 magazine. Walker is a member of Kamoinge, a group of New York-based African-American photographers co-founded by Draper.
#3. MING SMITH (birthdate not provided) born in Detroit
Self Portrait c. 1988
"Ming Smith is a New York–based photographer whose evocative pictures summon up dreamlike states, teasing out complex emotions and ideas deeply embedded in the places and consciousness of her subjects. Her work illuminates African Americans’ struggle for visibility in the wider cultural landscape.'
The Ecstatic, Elusive Art of Ming Smith - The New York Times.pdfMING SMITH, cont.
On Ming Smith, A Life of Magical Thinking, Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2021.
On Ming Smith, A Life of Magical Thinking, Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2021.
Click on the image on the right to read an interview with Ming Smith by Nicola Vassell.
An excerpt:
"Ming Smith will tell you that the essence of her great ability is instinct. That great ability—photography—is also a calling and, by most visible accounts, cosmic work. Smith was born in Detroit and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. She tethered herself to photography at an early age and swiftly exhibited an aptitude for it. After studying at Howard University and moving to New York to work as a model, Smith became the first and only female member of Kamoinge, a collective of Black photographers founded by Roy DeCarava, and the first Black woman photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York."
Below is work by Ming Smith.
Ming Smith, Curiosities, Brooklyn ,1976
MING SMITH, cont.
Ming Smith's Pioneering Excavations of Black Femininity" Yxta Maya Murray, The New Yorker, September 23, 2020
Click on the image on the right to read more about Ming Smith and her work, some of which is pictured below.
An excerpt:
'When Smith started out in photography, in the seventies, Black photographers were often overlooked by the major museums and galleries, or fetishized and misread. One notorious low point of the era was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Harlem on My Mind,” in 1969, which purported to document the neighborhood’s creative legacy but eschewed all Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement painting, sculpture, and drawing. Instead, the exhibition used photographs to illustrate Harlem’s history and undercut their significance by presenting them less as art than as sociological documentation. The Harlem photographer Roy DeCarava, who refused to participate in the show, said at the time that the organizers had “no respect for or understanding of photography, or, for that matter, any of the other media that they employed. I would say also that they have no great love or understanding for Harlem, Black people, or history.”
View below other works by Ming Smith.
'Goghing with Darkness and Light, Sunflowers'. Singen, West Germany, 1989.
'Bicentennial Celebration' Harlem, New York, 1976.
'Grace Jones, Studio 54,' New York, 1970s.
'Me as Marilyn'. 1991
'Judith Jamison,' 1980.
Tina Turner, 'What’s Love Got to Do with It,' 1984.
'Dakar Roadside with Figures,' Senegal, 1972.
MING SMITH cont.
OPTIONAL READ "How Ming Smith Used the Camera to Write Poems of Black Life by Miss Rosen", Blind Magazine (Photography at First Sight),Nov. 24, 2020.
Click on the right to read more about the extraordinary life of Ming Smith
An excerpt:
“When I’m shooting, I usually have a sense: ‘This is the photograph that I’m going to print. This is the moment,’” Smith says in the new book, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out…The image could be lost in a split second. I go with my intuition.”
Below are two pieces of work by Ming Smith.
'America Seen through Stars and Stripes' (painted), New York, 1976 © Ming Smith,
'Amen Corner Sisters', Harlem, New York, 1976
'Oopdeedoo', Brooklyn, 1976
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