This article was originally published by The Art Newspaper, an editorial partner of DailyExpertNews Style.
Kwame Brathwaite, the pioneering activist and photographer whose work helped define the aesthetic of the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s and beyond, passed away on April 1 at the age of 85.
His son, Kwame Brathwaite, Jr., announced his father’s death in an Instagram post that read in part: “I am deeply saddened to share that my Baba, the patriarch of our family, our rock and my hero, is passed over.”
Brathwaite’s work has received renewed interest from curators, historians and collectors in recent years, and his first major institutional retrospective, organized by the Aperture Foundation, debuted in 2019 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles before touring the country.
Kwame Brathwaite Credit: Cory Rice
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 the High School of Art and Design) and, according to Brathwaite profiles in T Magazine and Vice, he was drawn to photography by two moments. The first was in August 1955, when a 17-year-old Brathwaite came across David Jackson’s haunting photograph of an abused Emmett Till in his open coffin. The second was in 1956, when Brathwaite – after he and his brother Elombe co-founded the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) – saw a young man taking pictures in a dark jazz club without the use of a flash, and his mind was set on fire with the possibility.
Brathwaite’s photo of models embracing their natural hair, photographed in 1966. Credit: Courtesy of the Kwame Brathwaite Archive
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 story of his images. He would also soon develop a darkroom technique that enriches and deepens the black skin in his photography, sharpening the practice in a small darkroom in his Harlem apartment. Brathwaite went on to photograph jazz legends performing in the 1950s and 1960s, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and others.
“You want to get the feeling, the mood that you experience when they play,” Brathwaite told Aperture Magazine in 2017. “That’s the thing. You want to capture that.”
By the early 1960s, Brathwaite, along with the rest of AJASS, began using his photography and organizational talent to consciously push back against whitewashed, Eurocentric beauty standards. The group came up with the concept of the Grandassa Models, young black women that Brathwaite would photograph, celebrating and accentuating their features. In 1962, AJASS hosted “Naturally ’62”, a fashion show held at a Harlem club called the Purple Manor and featuring the models. The show would be held regularly until 1992. In 1966, Brathwaite married his wife Sikolo, a Grandassa model whom he had met on the street the previous year when he asked if he could portray her. The two remained married for the rest of Brathwaite’s life.
Women in a car gathered for Garvey Day, the annual event commemorating black activist Marcus Garvey. Credit: Courtesy of the Kwame Brathwaite Archive
In 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, including photographing the historic “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo that same year. On assignments during this time, Brathwaite also photographed Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Bob Marley and other music legends.
Over the following decades, Brathwaite continued to explore and develop his style of photography, all through the lens of the ‘Black is Beautiful’ ethos. In 2016, Brathwaite joined the roster of Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles, and he continued shooting assignments in 2018, when he photographed artist and stylist Joanne Petit-Frère for The New Yorker.
T Magazine’s 2021 profile, published to coincide with Brathwaite’s retrospective trip to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, noted that the photographer’s health was deteriorating to the point where he could not be interviewed for the article. A separate exhibit, “Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For,” is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will remain until July 24.
Top image: Kwame Brathwaite, “Untitled (Sikolo Brathwaite, Orange Portrait)”, 1968
