Editor’s note: This article was originally published by The art newspapereditorial partner of CNN Style.
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Kwame Brathwaite, the pioneering activist and photographer whose work helped define the aesthetics of the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s and beyond, died on April 1, at age 85.
His son, Kwame Brathwaite, Jr, announced his father’s death in a instagram post which read in part: “I am deeply saddened to share that my Baba, the patriarch of our family, our rock and my hero has transitioned.”
Brathwaite’s work. has been the topic of resurgent interest from curators, historians, and collectors in recent years, and its first major institutional retrospective, organized by the Aperture Foundation, made its debut in 2019 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles before touring the country.
Brathwaite was born in 1938 to Barbadian immigrants, in what he called “the People’s Republic of Brooklyn” in New York, although his family moved from there to Harlem and then to the South Bronx when Brathwaite was 5 years old. He attended the School of Industrial Art (now College of Art and Design) and, according to profiles by Brathwaite in T Magazine and ViceHe was attracted to photography for two moments. The first was in August 1955, when 17-year-old Brathwaite found David Jackson’s haunting photograph of a brutalized Emmett Till in his open coffin. The second was in 1956, when, after he and his brother Elombe had co-founded the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS), Brathwaite saw a young man taking photographs in a dark jazz club without the use of a flash, and his mind lit up with the possibility.
Using a Hasselblad medium format camera, Brathwaite attempted to do the same, learning to work with limited light in a way that enhanced the visual narrative of his images. He would also soon develop a darkroom technique that enriched and deepened how black skin would appear in his photography, perfecting the practice in a small darkroom in his Harlem apartment. Brathwaite went on to photograph jazz legends who performed during the 1950s and 1960s, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and others.
“You want to have the feeling, the mood that you’re experiencing when they play,” Brathwaite said. opening magazine in 2017. “That’s the thing. You want to capture that.”
In the early 1960s, along with the rest of AJAS, Brathwaite began using her photography and organizational prowess to consciously fight against whitewashed, Eurocentric beauty standards. The group came up with the concept of the Grandassa Models, young black women whom Brathwaite photographed, celebrating and accentuating their features. In 1962, AJASS organized “Naturally ’62,” a fashion show held at a Harlem club called Purple Manor and featuring models. The show would be held regularly until 1992. In 1966, Brathwaite married his wife Sikolo, a model from Grandassa whom he had met on the street the previous year when he asked if he could take her portrait. The two remained married for the rest of Brathwaite’s life.
In the 1970s, Brathwaite’s focus on jazz shifted to other forms of black popular music. In 1974, he traveled to Africa with the Jackson Five to document their tour, and also photographed the historic “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo that same year. Commissions from this era also saw Brathwaite photograph Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Bob Marley and other music legends.
Throughout the decades that followed, Brathwaite continued to explore and develop his mode of photography, all through the lens of the “Black is Beautiful” ethos. In 2016, Brathwaite joined the staff of Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles and continued photographing commissions in 2018, when he photographed artist and stylist Joanne Petit-Frère for The New Yorker.
T Magazine’s 2021 profile, published on the occasion of Brathwaite’s retrospective trip to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, noted that the photographer’s health was so deteriorating that he could not be interviewed for the article. A separate exhibition.”Kwame Brathwaite: Things worth waiting for”, is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will remain until July 24.
Cover image: Kwame Brathwaite, “Untitled (Sikolo Brathwaite, orange portrait)”, 1968
