Publisher’s note: This article was initially published by The Art Newspaper, an editorial partner of CNN Style.
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Kwame Brathwaite, activist and pioneer photographer whose work has helped to define the aesthetics of the “Noir is magnificent” movement from the 1960s and beyond, died on April 1, at the age of 85.
His son, Kwame Brathwaite, JR, announced the death of his father in an Instagram post who said in part: “I am deeply saddened to share that my Baba, the patriarch of our family, our rock and my hero made a transition.”
Brathwaite’s work has been the subject of resurgence interests of conservatives, historians and collectors in recent years, and its first major institutional retrospective, organized by the Aperture Foundation, made its debut in 2019 in Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles before visiting the country.
Brathwaite was born in 1938 of Barbadian immigrants, in what he called “the People’s Republic of Brooklyn” in New York, although his family moved from there to Harlem, then in the south of the Bronx when Brathwaite was 5 years old. He frequented the industrial art school (now the high school of art and design) and, according to Brathwaite profiles in T magazine and vice, was attracted to photography by two moments. The first took place in August 1955, when a 17 -year -old Brathwaite met David Jackson’s obsessive photography of an Emmett brutalized to his open coffin. The second took place in 1956, when – after he and his brother Elombe co -founded the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (Ajass) – Brathwaite saw a young man take photos in a dark jazz club without using a flash, and his mind was on fire with possibility.
Using a Hasselblad camera in medium format, Brathwaite tried to do the same, learning to work with a limited light in a way that improved the visual story of his imagery. He would soon also develop a dark room technique that has enriched and deepened how black skin appears in his photograph, perfecting the practice in a small dark room of his Harlem apartment. Brathwaite continued to photograph the legends of jazz occurring throughout the 1950s and 60s, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and others.
“You want to have the feeling, the atmosphere you feel when they play,” said Brathwaite à Aperture Magazine in 2017. “It’s the thing. You want to capture this.”
In the early 1960s, alongside the rest of Ajass, Brathwaite began to use his photograph and organize prowess to consciously repel against bleached and Eurocentric beauty standards. The group proposed the concept of the models of Grandassa, of young black women that Brathwaite would photograph, celebrate and accentuate their features. In 1962, Ajass organized “Naturally ’62”, a fashion show organized in a Harlem club called The Purple Manor and with the models. The show will take place regularly until 1992. In 1966, Brathwaite married his wife Sikolo, a Grandassa model whom he had met in the street the previous year when he had asked him if he could take his portrait. The two remained married for the rest of the life of Brathwaite.
In the 1970s, the focus of Brathwaite on jazz moved to other forms of popular black music. In 1974, he went to Africa with the Jackson Five to document their tour, also photographing the historic boxing match “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo the same year. The commissions of that time also saw Brathwaite photograph Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and The Family Stone, Bob Marley and other music legends.
During the decades that followed, Brathwaite continued to explore and develop his mode of photography, throughout the objective of “Black is Beautiful” ethics. In 2016, Brathwaite joined the list of Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles, and he continued to photograph commissions as recently as 2018, when he shot the artist and stylist Joanne Petit-Frère for the New Yorker.
The profile of T magazine in 2021, published on the occasion of Brathwaite’s retrospective, going to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, noted that the photographer’s health failed in such a way that it could not be interviewed for the article. A separate exhibition, “Kwame Brathwaite: things that are worth expected”, is currently exhibited at Art Institute of Chicago, where it will remain until July 24.
Higher image: Kwame Brathwaite, “Untitled (Sikolo Brathwaite, Orange Portrait)”, 1968