In 1972, Anthony Barboza made individual portraits of each member, which were displayed together at the group’s exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Later, Barboza asked each member to choose one of their own images to accompany their portrait and had them make fourteen prints. He then compiled the portraits and prints to create accordion bound books, which he gave to each of them as Christmas presents.

Louis Hansel Draper was born on September 24, 1935, in Henrico County, Virginia, just a few miles east of the Richmond city border. He grew up in a close-knit community in Richmond’s East End and attended Virginia State College (now University). During his senior year, he discovered Edward Steichen’s 1955 catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s Family of Man exhibition. The book was a revelation and turning point for Draper, convincing him of the power of photography. He moved to New York City in 1957 and studied with W. Eugene Smith, one of the most lauded photojournalists of the time, working as his assistant from 1959 to 1961. 

A network of friendships between African American photographers who met in New York grew into two separate groups in the early 1960s: Kamoinge and Group 35. Draper attended both, and in 1963 they merged to form the Kamoinge Workshop. As a community and as an ideal, Kamoinge was inextricably linked to Draper’s identity and work for the rest of his life. 

Draper played a key role in shaping the collective by articulating its early vision in writing. His poems frame Kamoinge’s two portfolios and he wrote various histories of the group. The concept for this exhibition emerged from the wealth of Draper’s archive of photographs, related manuscripts, and materials. In the spirit of Kamoinge, several other members—especially Shawn Walker, Beuford Smith, and Anthony Barboza—opened their own extensive archives to provide valuable material and context about the group’s early years.

In 2015 VMFA acquired Draper’s complete archive from his sister, Nell Draper-Winston. The archive consists of more than 6,600 items (representing more than 50,000 images), including photographs, negatives, contact sheets, slides, computer disks, audiovisual materials, and camera equipment, as well as valuable documents and publications, which include significant materials about the formation and early years of the Kamoinge Workshop. Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Draper archive is now completely catalogued, digitized, and available online.

Roy DeCarava’s photographs in the 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, which he made in collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes, was a touchstone for Kamoinge members. Beyond their aesthetic influence, the book’s photographs expressed DeCarava’s commitment to making images of the African American community. 

In 1952 DeCarava received a Guggenheim fellowship that provided a year’s leave from his job to dedicate to photography. DeCarava said he wanted to take photographs that communicated “the strength, the wisdom, the dignity” of African Americans in Harlem, offering “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding” only an African American photographer could provide.  DeCarava’s vision guided the collective’s early conversations about its shared identity. He was invited to serve as Kamoinge’s first president in 1963, a role he filled until he left the group in June 1965.

The Kamoinge Workshop began as a community of photographers who supported and encouraged one another. Within their first year, they also committed to portraying the communities around them. As they stated in the frontispieces for their first two portfolios: “The Kamoinge Workshop represents black photographers whose creative objectives reflect a concern for truth about the world, about the society, and about themselves.” 

Years later Louis Draper expanded on this statement:

Cognizant of the forces for change revolving around Kamoinge, we dedicated ourselves to speak of our lives as only we can. This was our story to tell and we set out 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.

Beyond making images of their communities, Kamoinge opened a gallery in Harlem for the community. Between March 1964 and June 1965, they held three exhibitions there and produced two portfolios of photographs, which they distributed to universities, libraries, and museums such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (See Portfolio 1 & Portfolio 2 at the Museum of Modern Art and see the version of Portfolio 1 in Louis Draper’s archive below.) In 1966, after they closed their own gallery, they opened an exhibition at the Countee Cullen Library titled Perspective. Simultaneously, Camera, an international photography magazine, featured the Kamoinge Workshop in a major photo-essay entitled “Harlem.” Click on the cover image of Camera below to view the entire article.

Many of the Kamoinge members were dedicated to teaching and mentoring youth. They taught in programs from Brooklyn and Harlem to the Bronx, equipping a younger generation with the technical and philosophical knowledge needed to make their own representations of their communities. From 1966 through 1968, Jimmie Mannas, Ray Francis, Herb Randall, and Lou Draper worked for the federally funded Neighborhood Youth Corps, as part of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Youth in Action program, training teenagers in all aspects of photography. Then, in the late 1960s, Draper and Danny Dawson taught a summer teen photography program and Draper participated in a youth mentorship program in the Bronx. The teens featured in these portraits participated in these programs.

Although most Kamoinge members would resist the label of civil rights photographer—which conjures violent images of fire hoses and attack dogs—Draper’s various histories emphasized that the collective formed in the midst of the movement. As he described:

Many of the group had been a part of the “March on Washington” with Reverend King. Others had witnessed southern law brutality brought on by voting rights activity and sit-in demonstrations. Within a year’s time, these same volatile forces would propel many of us into engaged and enraged resistance. 

Part of their resistance was to make images of African Americans that were lacking from the national conversation. Some members photographed leading figures and pivotal events of the civil rights movement. Many of their images, however, engaged the theme of civil rights on a symbolic level—such as the American flags woven throughout the photographs shown here—rather than serve as a journalistic record of the movement.  

Years before most of the Kamoinge Workshop members began traveling internationally, their choice of a name from the Gikuyu people of Kenya emphasized their global perspective. Kenya had gained independence from colonial rule the same year Kamoinge was formed. The decolonization movement swept across the African continent from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, a timeline that is roughly analogous with the United States civil rights movement. Draper noted: “Of even greater significance (to the solidification of the Kamoinge Workshop) was the volatile political climate of the 1960s and the emerging African consciousness exploding within us.” 

Many members traveled to Africa or other countries with significant African diaspora communities from the late 1960s through the 1970s. These photographs were made in Senegal, Cuba, Jamaica, Guyana, and Suriname. Members also depicted Black communities in the United States engaging in a pan-African dialogue.

Music held a central role for Kamoinge. Jazz was a near constant soundtrack for the group’s meetings, and musicians and live performances were the subject of many of their photographs. Jazz also served as a metaphor for photography itself. Rhythm, timing, and improvisation are key elements in street photography as well as experimental abstraction. In a group discussion in Black Creation in 1972, Draper likened the possibility of a Black aesthetic in photography to jazz, explaining: “The whole idea of making synonymous your feelings for the camera with your life experience is something that takes a while to develop. It would be, I imagine, akin to jazz and akin to certain very distinctly black outlets.” 

While Kamoinge has often been associated with street photography, abstraction was always a crucial part of the conversation. Draper, Fennar, and Cowans all came into the group having already developed abstract photographic practices in addition to a realist style. By the late 1960s and the 1970s, many of the younger members also began experimenting with abstraction, leading to a group dialogue around shadows, reflections, and identity.

In the late 1970s, several members of the Kamoinge Workshop joined with other photographers to begin a new group with a broader membership, the International Black Photographers. Soon after forming, the organization threw a dinner honoring James VanDerZee and Roy DeCarava. These dinners became an annual event through 1982, offering tributes to “outstanding elders of Black photography,” such as, P. H. Polk, Gordon Parks, Chuck Stewart, Moneta Sleet Jr., Morgan and Marvin Smith, and Richard Saunders. Anthony Barboza’s group portraits document the four dinners and underline how crucial this photographic community was in honoring the work of elders while encouraging the next generation of young photographers.