Photographer Kwame Brathwaite grew up in Harlem during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He had been a jazz musician and promoter when he first became interested in taking pictures. He saved for a Hasselblad camera with some of the proceeds from the jazz club he helped to run and began documenting some of the artists – Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey – he encountered.
Brathwaite was inspired by the Pan-African philosophy of Marcus Garvey and with his brother, Elombe, a political activist, he helped to create a new hub of creativity in Harlem – the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS) – a radical collection of artists, playwrights and dancers to celebrate the African roots of black American culture. Part of that celebration was a new ideal of black female fashion and beauty that rejected the dominant culture of straightened hair and “candy lipstick” of what was called “hot pants blackness” and embraced natural Afro hairstyles and bold African inspired clothes. Brathwaite and AJASS developed the idea for an arts festival called Naturally ’66 with these new “Grandassa” models.
This photo, taken by Brathwaite at a public school in Harlem, reveals how the “black is beautiful” look of the Naturally ’66 show was just beginning to be taken up as a statement by young black women more generally, a trend that spread across the nation. Brathwaite and his brother persevered with the ideals of AJASS through the decades that followed, bringing Nelson Mandela, among many other luminaries, to Harlem, and Brathwaite continued to document that movement with his camera. Until recently, he was something of a forgotten figure in that second Harlem renaissance, but that omission is put right with a wonderful, comprehensive book of his photographs, Black Is Beautiful, published next week.