Keeper of Images: A Celebration of Kwame Brathwaite

Known as the “keeper of images,” Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the 1950s and 1960s chronicled Black culture and life in Harlem and, later, Africa as communities struggled with issues of representation, economic liberation, and political consciousness. Brathwaite’s images were a form of social change, utilizing the teachings and words of Marcus Garvey and his Pan-Africanist movement to promote a Black aesthetic that celebrates the beauty of Blackness. Until recent years, his work largely remained on the periphery of the art world, despite his substantial contributions to the Black visual canon. In response to Braithwaite’s recent passing on April 1^st, let us look back at his oeuvre and its long-term significance, giving the artist his long-deserved due. 

For Brathwaite, two moments in his young adult life elicited an interest in photography. The first occurred in 1955 when a 17-year-old Braithwaite came across David Jackson’s photograph of Emmett Till in his open casket. First published in Jet magazine, the images of Till’s body forced people to face and acknowledge violence perpetrated against Black bodies. The resulting mobilization as a response to the photos conveyed to Brathwaite how photography could affect political change. 

Partially in response to this experience and in part due to their effort to center and commemorate Black cultural production, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe founded the African Jazz Arts Society & Studios (AJASS) in 1956. The group, composed of Black American artists, designers, musicians, writers, hairdressers, and jazz enthusiasts, would organize jazz concerts, art exhibitions, and cultural events. Shortly after, Brathwaite witnessed a friend taking photographs without the use of flash in a dark jazz club, astonished that someone would deliberately capture an image without the use of a light source. The experience energized him and ultimately led to him picking up a camera. His camera and film of choice–Hasselblad camera and Kodak Tri-X film–allowed him to move quickly, an ability that proved essential to his process. Early on in his career, Braithwaite captured images of jazz musicians like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonius Monk, and his speed permitted him to mimic the rapid movements of live jazz performances with his camera lens.

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Garvey Day, Deedee in Car), ca. 1965

While Brathwaite continued to memorialize jazz musicians, in the 1960s he began to employ his images to confront and reject the Eurocentric beauty standards that populated magazine covers, television and film, and advertisements. By recruiting Black American women who dressed in Afro-centric clothing, and were of varying skin tones and body shapes to become Grandassa Models, Brathwaite promoted the ideals of the ‘Black Is Beautiful movement.’ As Elizabeth Blair writes for NPR, the name ‘Grandassa’ came from Carlos Cooks, the founder of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, who used the term ‘Grandassaland’ to refer to Africa. The goal behind the ‘Black Is Beautiful’  initiative and the choice of models was to encourage Black women to embrace their natural beauty and restore their Black pride. 

The Grandassa Models challenged the idea of society’s traditional and limited view of beauty and confronted the repeated use of light-complexioned Black American women with straight hair in magazines and advertisements. As Brathwaite shared with Aperture, “There was lots of controversy because we were protesting how in Ebony magazine, you couldn’t find an ebony girl.” They found themselves at the center of the conversation on the rampant colorism within Black communities. Photographing Black women with darker skin and natural hair, often styled in afros, carved space for the nuances and heterogeneity of Blackness.

Given his championing of Black beauty and portrayal of Black life set against the backdrop of the Black freedom movement, one would presume that, like fellow photographers, Ming Smith and Carrie Mae Weems, Brathwaite’s work would have been celebrated. Sadly, that has not been the case. As Tanisha C. Ford wrote for The Atlantic, Brathwaite’s work primarily remained within Harlem’s Black nationalist community until 2014, when his family began to make his photo archive public, beginning with the publication of his first monograph, ‘Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful. His work's first major institutional retrospective didn’t occur until 2019, when the Aperture Foundation organized an exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. His work has also recently inspired the fashion and cosmetic industries, with Rihanna utilizing images from his oeuvre to guide the designs and aesthetics of her Fenty clothing line. 

This delayed recognition is astonishing due to his decades-long career and raises the question of why his images were relegated to the far edges of the art world. Could it be his attempt at dismantling the beauty standards of the time? Or his efforts to elevate self-representation through positive depictions of Blackness? To quote Ford again, Rihanna’s use of Brathwaite’s work upends the “practice of appropriation by placing black diasporic fashion history center stage.” The renewed interest in his work could be viewed as a reclamation of an integral but forgotten part of art history. Through Brathwaite’s work, we can trace the cultural production of Black Americans in society and the continued struggle for representation. 

‍