Bringing the Beauty Out

For the photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, the moment was always now.

- Shirley Nwangwa

WORKING TOGETHER: THE PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE KAMOINGE WORKSHOP opens at the Whitney Museum on November 21.

“BLACK IS IN NOW,” the photographer Beuford Smith tells me, referring to the current vogue among white-led cultural institutions and capitalist pursuits for tapping into the wellspring of our Black matter and belatedly recognizing and compensating Black artists for their labor. Smith is president emeritus of the Kamoinge Workshop, a fine-arts collective of Black photographers that formed in New York in 1963 and is the subject of a group retrospective, “Working Together,” which opens later this month at the Whitney Museum after originating at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Much of it is not familiar even to students of photography; all of it should be. The show reminds us that Black has always been in: in style, in love, in profundity, in mourning, in school, in danger, in the streets, in black and white, in color. These artists have spent a lifetime “taking the mundane and bringing the beauty out,” as Miya Fennar says of her late father, Al Fennar, whose work is among that of the 14 photographers presented in the show.