Gelatin silver printexpand_more
Gift of funds from Mary and Bob Merskyexpand_more 2021.109.1
Anthony Barboza and Beuford Smith are founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a groundbreaking photographic collective formed by and for Black lens-based artists in 1963. Members were diverse in their practices, but devoted in their support of one another in a medium and profession that often caricatured or excluded Black people. Each of these photographs capture everyday life in New York from the perspective of Black photographers devoted to the representation and celebration of their own communities. In their quotidian routines—at work in the garment district, posing in natty suits and coats, or smiling on a Harlem stoop—the subjects of Barboza and Smith’s portraits seem at once self-possessed and at ease with the act of being photographed. Barboza and Smith understood themselves as crucial participants in Black urban life, and as collective actors in a civic sphere in need of racial justice.
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