editor’s Note: This article was originally published by CNN Style’s editorial partner The Art Newspaper.
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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 the age of 85.
His son, Kwame Brathwaite, Jr., announced his father’s death in an Instagram post, reading in part, “I am deeply saddened to announce that my Baba, the patriarch of our family, our rock and my hero has passed away.”
Brathwaite’s work has been the subject of a resurgence among curators, historians, and collectors in recent years, and her 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 they 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 the High School of Art and Design) and, according to profiles of Brathwaite in T Magazine and Vice, was attracted to photography from an early age. The first incident occurred in August 1955, when 17-year-old Brathwaite encountered David Jackson’s haunted photograph of the brutal Emmett Till in his open coffin. The second case was in 1956, when – while he and his brother Elombe 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 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 imagination. He would also soon develop a darkroom technique that would enrich and deepen how black skin appeared in his photography, practicing in a small darkroom in his Harlem apartment. Brathwaite photographed jazz greats performing in the 1950s and 60s, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and others.
“You want to get that feeling, the mood that you’re experiencing when they’re playing,” Brathwaite told Aperture Magazine in 2017.
In the early 1960s, Brathwaite, along with the rest of AJASS, began to consciously use her photography and organizing skills against white, Eurocentric beauty standards. The group came up with the concept of Grandasa Models, young black women whom Brathwaite would photograph, celebrating and emphasizing their features. In 1962, AJASS organized “Naturally ’62”, a fashion show held at a Harlem club called the Purple Manor and featured models. The show would continue to be held regularly until 1992. In 1966, Brathwaite married his wife Sicolo, a Grandson model whom he had met on the street a year earlier when she asked if he could take her portrait. The two remained married for the rest of Brathwaite’s life.
By the 1970s, Brathwaite’s focus on jazz shifted to other forms of popular black music. In 1974, he traveled to Africa with the Jackson Five to document their tour, as well as photograph the historic “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman that same year in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Commissions from this era also saw Brathwaite photographing Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Bob Marley and other music greats.
Over the coming decades, Brathwaite continued to explore and develop his genre of photography, through the lens of a “Black is beautiful” ethos. In 2016, Brathwaite joined the roster of Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles, and he continued photographing commissions, most recently in 2018, when he shot artist and stylist Joan Petit-Frère for The New Yorker.
A 2021 profile in T Magazine, published on the occasion of Brathwaite’s retrospective visit to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, stated that the photographer’s health was so deteriorating that he was unable to be interviewed for the article. A separate exhibition, “Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For,” is currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will remain through July 24.
Top image: Kwame Brathwaite, “Untitled (Sicolo Brathwaite, Orange Portrait),” 1968