Kwame Brathwaite

Kwame Brathwaite was born on the first of January 1938 at Brooklyn, New York, the son of Edmond Brathwaite and Margaret Brathwaite, both Barbadian-born domestic-service workers who had migrated to New York in the early 1930s. He was raised in the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn and educated at Brooklyn Technical High School. He completed an associate's degree in commercial photography at the New York City Community College in 1956 and worked through his early twenties as a freelance photographer for the small Black-press publications of the Brooklyn and Harlem jazz scene.

In 1956 he and his elder brother Elombe Brath founded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios — known by its initials AJASS — a collective of African American jazz musicians, photographers, designers and dancers based at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. AJASS organised across the late 1950s and the 1960s the principal alternative-cultural infrastructure of African American Harlem: jazz concerts, fashion shows, gallery exhibitions, and the protest organising of the early Pan-African movement.

His decisive cultural contribution was the founding in January 1962 of the Grandassa Models — the modelling agency he and AJASS established to feature Black women in their natural hair and African-inspired dress, and the production of the photographic body of work that documented them. The Grandassa fashion shows of 1962 through the 1970s — held at the Purple Manor in Harlem and at the AJASS Studios on West 125th Street — produced the cultural-aesthetic foundation of what would by 1968 be called the Black Is Beautiful movement. Brathwaite himself coined the phrase in a 1962 print advertisement for the first Grandassa show.

He photographed across the following five decades the principal cultural and political figures of African American and Pan-African life — Stokely Carmichael (placed in this archive), Muhammad Ali (placed in this archive), Malcolm X (placed in this archive), Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, James Baldwin (placed in this archive), Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela. He worked from 1968 as the principal Harlem photographer for Jet magazine and from the early 1970s for Essence.

His mature retrospective exhibition — Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful — opened at the Aperture Foundation in New York in April 2019 and travelled subsequently to the Museum of the African Diaspora at San Francisco, the Skirball Cultural Center at Los Angeles, the New-York Historical Society, and finally the Mott-Warsh Collection at Flint.

He died at New York on the first of April 2023, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the photographer of Black Is Beautiful.