Photographer Kwame Brathwaite has died aged 85, his son Kwame Samori Brathwaite Jr. advertised on social media yesterday April 2. Brathwaite, who drew heavily on the teachings and writings of Marcus Garvey and Carlos Cooks, had a 60-year career as a photographer that popularized the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement in the 1960s and continued to empower Africans and Africans. American cultural expression and lifetime achievement.
Brathwaite was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Barbadian immigrants Cecil and Margaret Etelka Brathwaite on January 1, 1938. A middle child, Brathwaite and his brothers Elombe and John Edward grew up in the South Bronx where he was admitted to the School of Industrial Art. (now called the High School of Art and Design) in the early 1950s. Brathwaite had considered a career in graphic design until 1955 when he came across photos in Jet Magazine of 14-year-old Emmett Till lying maimed in his casket after he was murdered by white civilians in Drew, Mississippi that year. The sight of this brutal murder, made public across the nation with the permission and encouragement of her mother Mamie Till, sparked something within Brathwaite, who understood the power of photography and exposure in the quest to recalibrate the public understanding of darkness.
A year later, Brathwaite and his older brother Elombe turned to art and activism by co-founding the African Jazz Art Society and Studios (AJASS) to serve as a cultural center for music, fashion and the arts of the stage as a means of reintegrating jazz. uptown throwback scene from where he wandered off. As AJASS began staging shows across Harlem and the Bronx, Brathwaite observed a man taking photos at one of the events and decided to try it out for himself, saying he was coming. just from “fell in love with textures“, in particular the” slight grain of grain “.
Brathwaite’s artistic inclinations made it natural to capture the nightlife of AJASS, knowing exactly when a musician would launch into a solo onstage or anticipating the directions of a performance. Shortly after picking up the camera, Brathwaite found himself photographing jazz legends such as Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie and Cannonball Adderley at the Randalls Island Jazz Festival in 1958.
In 1962, AJASS launched headlong into fashion and editorial photography with the conception of Grandassa Models, a group of diverse black women sporting natural hair, full lips, and a variety of body types. That year, Brathwaite and the Grandassa Models celebrated Pan-African culture and art through “Naturally ’62», an AJASS-affiliated fashion show at the Purple Manor jazz club in Harlem. “We said, ‘We have to do something to make women feel proud of their hair, proud of their blackness,'” Brathwaite recalled in the New Yorker in 2019 remembering the impact of the Grandassa models.
It was through “Naturally” and its subsequent series of annual events that Brathwaite and Grandassa Models catapulted “Black is Beautiful” into a national movement. Brathwaite’s photos of models, including his wife Sikolo, dressed in Afrocentric clothes and accessories as they paraded down the catwalk to listen to live jazz and posters celebrating Marcus Garvey and Patrice Lumumba helped politicize the essence of black success. Portraits of Brathwaite’s models began to adorn the covers of highly profitable jazz label Blue Note Records albums, such as “Good Gracious!” by Lou Donaldson. (1963) and Freddie Roach’s “Brown Sugar” (1964), rejecting the prescribed beauty ideals of the 1960s.
In the 70s, Brathwaite was the black celebrity photographer of choice, capturing portraits of Muhammad Ali, Roberta Flack, Grace Jones, Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonders and even the Jackson 5 during a family trip to Senegal. .
As a career photographer, Brathwaite was best known for his work in pop culture and media rather than the white walls of galleries and exhibition venues. Through his performance at the Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles, California, Brathwaite’s iconic photography has been featured in solo exhibitions, group shows and art fairs over the past decade. The Aperture Foundation has also organized a traveling exhibition honoring Brathwaite’s contributions to the “Black is Beautiful” movement that moved coast to coast between 2019 and 2020. Contemporary black artists today credit Brathwaite’s photography with inspiring their art, including Barbadian singer Rihanna who used her “Black is Beautiful” era photograph. as a parallel to her own imagery for her Advertising campaign for the Fenty clothing line.
Brathwaite’s photograph is exhibited in Kwame Brathwaite: Things worth waiting for until July 24 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
