American photographer Kwame Brathwaite passes away
Photographer Kwame Brathwaite, who through his warm and elegant photographs documenting life and culture adjacent to the civil rights and Black Power movements popularized the phrase "Black is beautiful", died in Brooklyn on April 1, aged 85. . Brathwaite with his older brother, Elombe Brath, founded the African Jazz Art Society and Studios (AJASS) and Grandassa Models, both of which successfully brought dark-skinned beauty ideals into the mainstream at a time when even magazines aimed primarily for African-American audiences, such as Ebony and Jet, promoted and held women to a standard of beauty that reflected white references to attractiveness. "We were protesting how, in Ebony magazine, you couldn't find an ebony girl," he told Aperture's Tanisha Ford in 2020.
Kwame Brathwaite was born on January 1, 1938, in Brooklyn, to parents who immigrated to the United States from Barbados. When he was five, the family moved north to the South Bronx. Intent on becoming a graphic designer, Brathwaite enrolled at the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design). A teenage encounter with photographs of ten-year-old Emmett Till's brutalized body in the pages of Jet left him shaken, and in 1955 he turned his attention to documentary photography.
In 1956, Brathwaite and Brath with a group of friends founded the collective African Jazz Art Society and Studios, or AJASS, which counted among its members playwrights, graphic artists, dancers and fashion designers. Jazz societies were common at the time, but use of the word African was not: Brathwaite would later cite activist Carlos Cooks' ardent repetition of phrases coined by Marcus Garvey – among them "Go back to Africa" and "Black is beautiful". - as an inspiration to turn to the then outmoded term.
In 1962, AJASS expanded its reach to include fashion shows, the first of which was titled “Naturally '62: The Original African Coiffure and Fashion Extravaganza Designed to Restore Our Racial Pride and Standards”. Brathwaite and Brath, with the help of fellow AJASS member Jimmy Abu, recruited local young women to appear on the show whose dark skin and natural hairstyles contrasted with the ironed hair and light skin tones then considered fashionable. Dubbed the Grandassa models, the women appeared in vibrantly patterned dresses and chunky jewels, instantly embodying the zeitgeist of the era. The shows became a regular event not just in Harlem, but in venues across the country, the looks presented at them released to the world and popularized through the very publications that had previously shunned overt expressions of blackness.
Increasingly delving into Pan-Africanism, he was able, thanks to his financial success in the field of commercial photography and photojournalism, to travel with Brath to Africa in the 1970s. Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Namibia, Tanzania and Kenya, among others.
Despite his influential achievements, Brathwaite has only become widely known and recognized in recent years. In 2017, he was honored at the seventy-fifth Aperture Magazine Gala; the following year, her work appeared in the pages of the New Yorker, and in 2019 critic Antwaun Sargent cited her “Black is beautiful” aesthetic as a primary influence on a range of young contemporary artists. An Aperture exhibition of his work has been touring since 2019. “Things Worth Waiting For,” a selection of his photographs centered on his passion for music, is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through July 24. Asked by Aperture's Ford to comment on his legacy a few years before his death, Brathwaite was succinct, replying simply: "I love black people."