18 Black Photographers Who Have Made History
1. Gordon Parks, "American Gothic", 1942, silver gelatin print
Gordon Parks’s 1942 portrait of government worker Ella Watson, which he famously titled American Gothic, is among the most celebrated and influential photographs of the 20th century. Created as part of an extensive collaboration between the photographer and his subject, it is at once a record of one woman’s position within the racial, professional, and economic hierarchies that stratified the nation’s capital and Parks’s visual reckoning with the realities of Black life in racially segregated Washington, D.C. Remarkably layered and yet instantly legible, American Gothic communicated a complex of injustices with the barest of means: a flag, a woman, a broom, a mop.
(The Gordon Parks Foundation, 2024)
2. Roy DeCarava, "Bill and Son", 1963, silver gelatin print
Born and raised in Harlem, photographer Roy DeCarava first studied art in New York City’s public schools. After a stint making prints and paintings in the poster division of the Works Progress Administration, he studied at Cooper Union, Harlem Community Art Center, and George Washington Carver Art School. Originally purchasing a camera to gather visual information for his paintings, he began to exclusively use photography as a means of artistic expression in the mid-1940s. He photographed the streets of Harlem, capturing images of the civil rights movement, jazz scenes, and the urban landscape. He imbued his subjects with power, elegance, and grace to contradict how, according to DeCarava, Black people were “not being portrayed in a serious and artistic way.”
(Studio Museum in Harlem)
3. Carrie Mae Weems, "Unititled" from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990
For this series, Carrie Mae Weems staged and photographed a fictional drama in which she plays the lead. The setting is always the same: a small room with a table and a single overhead light. Other cast members play lovers, friends, and daughters. From this modest setup, the artist creates an entire world. The kitchen, traditionally considered a female space, has rarely been pictured as a site of importance. Weems turns this idea on its head. She suggests the kitchen table is the real stage where life’s biggest moments play out, and where the full range of human emotions is expressed. The series compellingly examines women’s lives. It boldly asserts, in particular, Black womanhood’s complexity, strength, and beauty.
4. Hugh Bell, "Billie Holiday", 1956, silver gelatin print
Widely known for his engaging photographs of jazz musicians, Hugh Bell (1927-2012) used his talents as a skilled portraitist, his understanding of the vicissitudes of human emotion, and a Henry Ossawa Tanner inflected exploration of human qualities to capture the vulnerabilities and strengths of his subjects in a way that only a scant few have been able to do. After graduating from New York University in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Cinematic Art he frequented and photographed the dancehalls of the 50’s, capturing most of the legendary jazz artists, including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Louis Armstrong. In 1955, Edward Steichen selected Bell’s “Hot Jazz” for ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition. Over 2 million photos were submitted for the exhibition and only 503 were selected. The exhibit showcased work from 273 photographers including Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston and Irving Penn. ‘The Family of Man’ was first shown in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and then toured 38 countries over several years. It is considered to be the most successful photography exhibit ever.
(Valentine Museum of Art)
5. Dawoud Bey, "Four Children at Lenox Avenue", Harlem, NY, from Harlem, U.S.A., 1977
Bey began photographing in Harlem in 1975, at the age of twenty-two. Although he was raised in Queens, Bey was intimately connected to the neighborhood: his parents had met there, and members of his extended family still made it their home. Drawn to the neighborhood as both a symbol of and a wellspring for Black American culture, Bey wanted to portray its residents as complex individuals in images free of stereotype. These works all come from the series Harlem, U.S.A. (1975–79).
Bey used a 35mm camera with a slightly wide-angle lens, which required him to get close to his subjects while grounding them in the cityscape behind them. His set-up was nimble and discreet, and let the artist carefully control the framing. In 1979, the series was exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a museum dedicated to the arts of the African diaspora. Even at this very early moment in his career, it was critical to Bey that the works be shown in the community where they were made, allowing the people he was representing to have access to the work they inspired.
(Whitney Museum of American Art)
6. Jamel Shabazz, "The Trio", 1980
The subway system in New York City snakes through each of its five boroughs, connecting residents via hundreds of miles of electrified tracks. Just as passengers have been accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) – including its frequent delays and signal malfunctions – so too have they become familiar with art and performing arts within the trains and stations. In the 1980s, in particular, as street art exploded around the city, the steel train cars became the canvases for graffiti artists.
Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz, who was in his 20s at the time, documented the diversity of New York City’s cast of characters against a backdrop of scrawled spray paint, tiled station walls and the uniform plastic seating of train cars and buses. In these enclosed, transitory spaces, Shabazz photographed everything from black youth culture, fashionable straphangers and eccentric musical performers, to the tired commuters and homeless population who filled the subway’s seats.
(CNN)
7. Kwame Brathwaite, "Black is Beautiful", 1968
His visual contributions to the “Black Is Beautiful” movement in the 1950s and 1960s were foundational to its impact and progression. Through his photography of Black musicians and models, he spearheaded the way for fashion photography and Black aesthetics. He photographed freedom fighters to famous Black figures, such as Mohammad Ali, Bob Marley, and Grace Jones. Brathwaite was considered one of the best concert photographers, photographing the live performances of Black musicians like James Brown, Miles Davis, and Billie Holliday. His images approach Black life with pride and care and demonstrate a level of intentionality with his camera.
(Studio Museum in Harlem)
8. Ming Smith, "Amen Corner Sisters", Harlem, New York, 1976
Ming Smith is known for her informal, in-action portraits of black cultural figures, from Alvin Ailey to Nina Simone and a wide range of jazz musicians. Ming’s career emerged formally with the publication of the Black Photographer’s Annual in 1973. She was an early member of the Kamoinge Workshop, an association of several generations of black photographers. Ming has traveled extensively, showing her viewers a cosmopolitan world filled with famous landmarks and extraordinary landscapes. People continue to be her most treasured subjects. This is most apparent in her series depicting African American life. Ming Smith's photography is held in collections in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum Center for African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; and the AT Corporation.
9. Anthony Barboza, Mythical Power - Black Dreams/White Sheets, c. 1990s
Anthony Barboza moved to New York City in 1963 at the age of 19 to pursue a career in photography. He briefly attended the New York Institute of Photography but found his true education through his involvement with the Kamoinge Workshop, to which he was introduced by Adger Cowans. Barboza described the group as “his college,” where he learned about not just photography but also literature, art, and life itself. The Kamoinge Workshop fostered a community focused on addressing issues of representation and the role of Black photographers in depicting Black life.
Barboza’s career flourished in the 1970s when he worked with renowned fashion photographer Hugh Bell and contributed commercial photographs to Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Life, Essence, and Esquire. He served on the editorial team of the Black Photographers Annual, a publication committed to countering negative portrayals of Black people. His work was featured in the landmark 1978 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, in which he and Roy DeCarava were the only two Black photographers.
(National Gallery of Art)
10. Lorna Simpson, "Stereo Styles", 1988
Using the camera as catalyst, Lorna Simpson is a conceptual artist who constructs assemblies of text and image, parts to wholes, commenting on the documentary nature of found or staged images. The exhibition follows Simpson’s point of view and themes beginning with her earliest documentary photographs from the late 1970s / early 1980s, never before exhibited, to her most recent works. It includes large-scale photo-text pieces of the mid-1980s that first brought her to critical attention and offered stark abstracted images of an African-American female figure (at times male as well), head cropped from the frame or back turned to the camera, nonetheless given voice through text panels or captions, a proto-cinematic construction of shot and script.
(Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography)
11. Sanlé Sory, Belle du jour, 1975
Sanlé Sory's (b. 1943; Nianiagara, Burkina Faso) portraits are key documents of the exuberant youth culture in Burkina Faso following the small West African nation's independence from France. After learning to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex 6x6 camera and process prints, Sory opened his studio, Volta Photo, in 1960, the same year his country (then called Upper Volta) began its transition from remote colony to independent nation. He worked as a regional reporter, event photographer and record sleeve illustrator active in the city's dynamic music scene. Most notably, however, Sory was one of Bobo-Dioulasso's earliest and finest studio photographers.
12. Deana Lawson, "Living Room", Brownsville, Brooklyn, 2015
Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, New York) makes photographs that explore the Black familiar and its relationship to lore, global histories, and mystery traditions. She transforms observational picture-making into a powerful mode of expression, critique, and celebration. Romance and intimacy between subjects, as well as ritual and spirituality appear throughout Lawson’s work, often within the same image. Her photographs emphasize formal approaches to film commonly associated with both Western and African twentieth-century portraiture practices, in addition to appropriation and uses of vernacular imagery. Lawson engages her subjects with intention and intuition alike, in staged situations characterized by the piercing directness of the model’s gaze.
(David Kordansky Gallery)
13. Lyle Ashton Harris, "The Miss America", 1987-1988
Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic.
Harris is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Tate Modern, London, UK; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland, among others.
14. Nona Faustine, "From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth", 2013
Faustine is best known for photographs in which she stages herself, often nude aside from white heels, in front of sites associated with chattel slavery in New York City. In doing so, she reveals the incomplete histories of people whose existence and contributions have yet to be recognized or memorialized. On choosing a location like Wall Street for her work, Faustine says, “Enslaved people cleared the forests, built the roads and buildings, built forts and the wall that gave Wall St. its name. Human beings were the first commodity of the greatest finance capital in the world.”1 Through inserting her own body in the history and architecture of New York City, she brings attention to the ways that marginalized communities, particularly Black women, experienced and resisted the horrors of enslavement—and that they continue to carry its legacies today.
(Studio Museum in Harlem)
15. Hank Willis Thomas, "The Cotton Bowl", 2011
Hank Willis Thomas has explored the language of branding and advertising in his photographs throughout much of his career. “I started thinking about logos as our generation’s hieroglyphs,” said Thomas in a 2015 interview with The Brooklyn Rail. “They can be embedded with so much meaning, and I really wanted to play off that.”
Using commercial campaign strategies, Thomas reveals how branding has shaped contemporary and historical Black identity in American culture, exposing the parallels between systems of possessing black bodies as commodities, and examining how companies elicit desire while maintaining culturally-embedded racism.
(Musee Magazine)
16. Tyler Mitchell, "Cage" from Chrysalis exhibit, 2022
Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995, Atlanta, GA) is an artist, photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. He received his B.F.A. in Film and Television from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His work introduces new narratives about beauty and desire, embracing themes of the past and creating fictionalized moments of the imagined future. Mitchell’s work is characterized by a visual representation of Black life that emphasizes empowerment, transcendence, play and self determination. He is often inspired by pastoral and domestic scenes from his upbringing in suburban Georgia.
In 2018, he made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue for Beyoncé’s appearance in the September issue. The following year, a portrait from this series was acquired by The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery for its permanent collection.
17. Dana Scruggs, Roze en Playa Del Carmen for Roze Traore, 2021
Against the backdrop of a fraught US racial climate, to behold the seminal work of Dana Scruggs — her ode to the beauty of the Black male body — is to witness a soul-stirring reclamation of power and autonomy within her subjects: a deft dismantling of the colonial gaze. The New York-based photographer’s signature handling of light and movement all but transcends the static medium, at once forceful and ethereal, dynamic and delicate. “There’s a fearfulness of Black men in American society and globally,” Scruggs has said. “I wanted to change the narrative.”
To date, Scruggs’ achievements as a photographer are historic. In 2018 she became the first Black woman to shoot an athlete for ESPN’s The Body Issue; later that year, she became the first Black person to photograph a Rolling Stone cover in the magazine’s fifty year history. She was handpicked by rapper P. Diddy to shoot his 2019 Essence cover and has lent her vision to GQ, the New York Times and beyond. But for Scruggs, shattering the ceiling was far from a straightforward manoeuvre.
18. Renee Cox, "Missy by the Pool" from The Discreet Charms of the Bougie, 2009
Born in Jamaica before her family relocated to New York, Cox says she was “always interested in the visual.”1 After earning her undergraduate degree, she worked as a professional fashion photographer and developed her own artistic practice in the 1990s. Her engagement with social issues—particularly those related to gender and race—has been apparent since that time: in her first solo exhibition, in 1998, at Cristinerose Gallery, she presented photographs of herself as a superhero leading a crusade to overturn stereotypes.
Cox’s larger-than-life photographs critique and repurpose stereotypical depictions of Black women. Her practice references historical artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, and Édouard Manet, to recreate the art historical canon and imagine new methods of representation. Her styles also evoke the work of James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks. Many of her photographs reference biblical subject matter and pointedly insert people of color into these stories, thereby underscoring the importance of religion in many marginalized communities despite their lack of representation in its artistic depictions. Consistently pushing the limits of the medium, Cox uses both archival photographs and new images to create new types of consciousness around the Black body.
(Studio Museum in Harlem)
