Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Art Newspaper, a CNN Style editorial partner.
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Kwame Brathwaite, the pioneering activist and photographer whose work helped define the aesthetic 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 passing 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, has transitioned.”
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 across the country.
Brathwaite was born in 1938 to Barbadian immigrants, in what he called “the People’s Republic of Brooklyn” in New York City, though his family moved from there to Harlem and then the South Bronx when Brathwaite was 5. 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, he was drawn to photography at two points. The first was in August 1955, when Brathwaite, aged 17, came across David Jackson’s haunting photograph of a brutalized Emmett Till in his open casket. The second came 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 using a flash, and his mind lit up with possibilities.
Brathwaite attempted to do the same with a Hasselblad medium-format camera, learning to work with limited light in a way that enhanced the visual narrative of his images. He also soon developed a darkroom technique that enriched and deepened the way black skin appeared in his photographs, perfecting the practice in a small darkroom in his Harlem apartment. Brathwaite continued to photograph jazz legends in concert throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and others.
“You want to feel the feeling, the vibe that you get when they’re playing,” Brathwaite told Aperture magazine in 2017. “That’s it, you want to capture that.”
In the early 1960s, alongside the rest of AJASS, Brathwaite began using his photography and organizing prowess to consciously oppose whitewashed, Eurocentric beauty standards. The group invented the concept of the Grandassa Models, young black women whom Brathwaite would photograph, celebrating and accentuating their features. In 1962, AJASS organized “Naturally ’62,” a fashion show held at a Harlem club called the Purple Manor and featuring the models. The show ran 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 take her portrait. The two remained married for the rest of Brathwaite’s life.
In the 1970s, Brathwaite became increasingly interested in jazz and 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 Congo that same year. During this time, Brathwaite also photographed Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Bob Marley, and other music legends.
Over the next few decades, Brathwaite continued to explore and develop his mode of photography, always through the lens of the “Black is Beautiful” philosophy. In 2016, Brathwaite joined Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles and continued to photograph commissions until 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 at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, noted that the photographer’s health was so failing 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 (Sikolo Brathwaite, Orange Portrait),” 1968
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