I didn't choose photography, photography chose me.
I see beauty in so many things.
I always just photograph from that sense of beauty.
I consider photography alchemy.
I really consider the magic of it.
The fact that you stop time and take a part of time.
All the craft in the world doesn't mean a damn thing.
You need the craft, but you need the craft for what reason?
You need the craft to tell the story.
What story are you telling?
Kamoinge could speak about Black folks
the way no one else could.
Black people are beautiful.
We just did what we understood
and what we know in a beautiful way.
Kamoinge Workshop started in 1963.
The word, Kamoinge came from the Kikuyu dialect
and it translates into a group acting together
or a group working together.
The mission of Kamoinge was excellence,
photographic excellence in terms
of interpreting African-American life and culture.
The photographs you saw of Black folks
were predominantly by white photographers.
We wanted to put something out about Black people
that the local newspapers weren't doing,
the way they viewed us as a community.
Black people would finally decide,
we can do this ourself.
Why should we subject ourself to negativity
when in fact, we're beautiful?
One of the reasons people in
Kamoinge were attracted to each other,
we had a shared world vision.
I mean, there was always this deep respect
for other artists.
It was just really, for me, it was community.
We learned from each other.
It was like going to the best school
that you could go to and still have party night.
And then Kamoinge was also housed in Harlem,
so we were coming into the center
of the kind of Black art universe, the Black world of art.
What distinguishes Kamoinge from
any other collective is their standards.
Lou Draper would always encourage,
you know, the younger artists who came in.
Lou's constant honesty, his constant integrity.
It comes out in brilliant photographs.
Beuford, his wit comes out quite often in his images.
That's his personality.
I can look at a Shawn Walker photograph
and I say, "Hey, Shawn Walker took that."
Herb Robinson was very quiet
kind of laid back kind of guy.
You can see it in his pictures.
Ray Francis did some beautiful street work.
Herman Howard one of the
most energetic persons I've ever been around in my life.
And his photographs showed that
energy, movement, lights splashing.
Al Fennar, he rendered himself invisible
in a way that his work spoke for him.
Very subtle.
Ming Smith. Ming has always had a personal vision.
Herbie Randall.
I loved his work.
There was something so pure, the humanity, you know
in his work.
Adger Cowans is a charismatic figure.
And you can see it in Adger's pictures.
There was just this positive outlook
of working together
because they ain't paying attention to us.
But we are working together to do what we
feel strongly about. And that's called black excellence.
The politics never went away.
That's our circumstance living in the United States
being a civil rights photographer,
that's a label that's external to our aspirations.
We weren't doing that, but we were doing civil rights.
We were doing things about uplifting black culture.
I'm there because I'm a documentarian
and I'm photographing this history.
And in some points
our work was to try to point out the police state
the apartheid state that we were in.
The work was black.
So that made it political back then
and it's making a political now.
I was a black photographer photographing black life.
I was in there, baby.
And I'm in there now where you're putting your knee
on people's neck and whatnot unnecessarily and killing them.
It affects you man, these are your people.
You're part of this country.
You, you can't just separate yourself.
Everybody understands that your actions are also tools
for social change
and your actions as well as you art, can be that.
The only way you can really survive
is collectively.
I think we were part of the second
Harlem Renaissance the '60s.
Well, I think the group is really important.
You're a part of something of consequence, artistically
and socially, and historically.
Through Kamoinge there's possibilities.
Now people can be somebody through their art
to me is, that's really what it's about.
We're going to teach you everything
you need to know about art
and give you choices in life.
That's what Kamoinge did.
It gave me choices.
Kamoinge was sort of a life starting for me.
It's all, it's working together.
It's something natural.
It's in us.
It's always been in us and it ain't leaving either.