Description:
- Powerful portraits from the 1960s "Black Is Beautiful" movement
- Accessible fusion of fashion, art, and social history
- The first book on this influential African American photographer, now being widely recognized
Brief description: Kwame Brathwaite (born in New York, 1938; died in New York, 2023) is represented by Philip Martin in Los Angeles. Beginning in the early 1960s, Brathwaite photographed stories for black publications such as the New York Amsterdam News, City Sun, and Daily Challenge, helping set the stage for the Black Arts and Black Power movements. By the 1970s, Brathwaite was one of the era's top concert photographers, shaping the images of such public figures as Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, James Brown, and Muhammad Ali. Brathwaite wrote about and photographed such landmark events as the the Motortown Revue at the Apollo (1963); Wattstax '72 (1972); the Jackson 5's first trip to Africa (1974); and the festival "Zaire '74," which accompanied the famous Foreman-Ali fight, the "Rumble in the Jungle." Recent acquirers of Brathwaite's work include the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.
Review Quotes: "From Beyoncé to Barack Obama, it's hard to think of a black figure who does not owe their prominence, in some measure, to the ethos of 'Black is Beautiful'" --Ekow Eshun, Financial Times
"The Brooklyn-born photographer spent his career working to elevate natural black beauty during a time when the fashion industry was resistant." --the Guardian "Together, the exhibition and the monograph are important footnotes to a slogan that has become both a state of mind and a revolutionary movement." --Hyperallergic "Through Brathwaite's delicate and compassionate eye, the black female form, unadulterated in appearance, gave a new visual language that helped heal centuries-old white-supremacist wounds. The Grandassa models were an idealization of a black female utopia, which reinvigorated a limitless Africa that carried all the dialects, languages, accents, and subcultures within one womb. Brathwaite did not depict the black woman as what she could be, but as what she had always been, her beauty a constant and not something to be fixed." --Morgan Jerkins, Artsy