In the fall of 1963 — the final year of Jim Crow America — two Harlem-based groups of Black photographers came together to create the Kamoinge Workshop, which has since become the world’s longest-running photography collective. Taken from the Gikuyu language of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge provided a space for both professional photographers including Roy DeCarava, Adger Cowans, and Louis H. Draper to nurture emerging talents drawn from the community at a time when Black artists were systemically excluded from the fine art world.
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As an institution of authority, wealth, and prestige, the fine art world mirrored and maintained the exclusionary systems of power of the dominant culture it served. The work of Black artists and depictions of Black life rarely appeared within the hallowed halls of museums and galleries. It fell upon Black artists to create and sustain spaces to nurture their own styles and approaches to artmaking, without the structures of support afforded to countless white male artists.
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Rather than adopt the American obsession with “rugged individualism,” the members of Kamoinge understood the power of the group. Every Sunday, DeCarava, Cowans, and Draper would gather alongside founding members James Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Earl James, Anthony Barboza, Calvin Mercer, Beuford Smith. Herb Randall, Albert Fennar, Shawn Walker, James Mannas, and later Ming Smith, for rousing conversations about art, photography, film, music, and literature as well as in-depth critiques of their work. “We all met at somebody’s home and became family,” Walker remembers.
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Without institutional support, Kamoinge made a way for themselves — a path they forged for nearly 60 years to become the longest-running photography collective in history. Yet, because of the on-going practice of exclusion within the art world, their works are only now being given their proper due in the major touring museum exhibition, Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.
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