Highlight: Black Photographers
We are the kind of photography professionals that value and enjoy looking at different kinds of work all the time. We do it because we are part of a photo community and we do it to get inspired for when we take our business headshots and corporate portraits. While so much of our work is about creating a beautiful and consistent look for our clients and companies, the reason they are a cut above is because we learn from the masters. We take inspiration from so many other art, documentary and New York corporate photographers out there doing their work.
The simple truth is, we love photography and consume as much of it as we can. We love the immediate impact it makes on us. We love thinking about the composition, the colors (or lack thereof) and the purpose of the photo. We think about who took the photo and why that person made the creative and narrative choices they did. We dig deep and do so, not just because we enjoy it, but because we know it helps us understand something about the world. This, in turn, makes us better photographers.
Black Lives Matter has been on our mind, as it has been for all Americans. We have been thinking about how Black people experience the world. This movement and effort to deepen our understanding, as a country, is not just about this moment in 2020. It is about every year leading up to it in America. And we are incredibly thankful to have our fellow Black photographers to help us better understand from the myriad ways it presents and they see it. We thank Black photographers, whether they were part of a momentous movement like the Civil Rights movement, or are just showing us something about a regular life. We appreciate the perspective and are glad to have a starting point to understand their world. We are grateful for what they bring to us as artists, documentarians and storytellers.
Roy DeCarava
Roy DeCarava was a 20th century photographer that focused on black culture in a humanistic way. He is well known for being part of the Harlem Renaissance and was an important voice in covering the events and life during that period.
DeCarava uses shadow and light, obscure and clear, all in an effort to show us how he feels when he sees the photo. The images combine familiar forms with context that is often just a suggestion – a profile of a backlit 4-piece band on stage, a woman with a cautious look on her face in what looks like a subway or other urban background, 2 young boys with chalk marks as the outline of a game on a city sidewalk.
He, notably, covered jazz greats John Coltrane and Billie Holiday, among others. But he also focused heavily on how things felt and looked in Harlem from the 1940s and 1950s. He was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed him to focus exclusively on this community and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. The work was part of an exhibition at the MoMA. He was trying to create, “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which...only a Negro photographer [could] interpret. (From Randy Kennedy's obituary on Roy DeCarava published in the New York Times)
We are grateful for the work that he gave to us. He showed us Harlem in an artful and intimate way. He shared his perspective on Black people living their lives and creating their own art.
Gordon Parks
Where Roy DeCarava gave us art and feeling, Gordon Parks gives us a powerful, in-your-face documentary view of Harlem around the same time. Where DeCarava uses light, shadow and other techniques to depict his subjects, Parks was a journalist with a more straightforward, yet still powerful and masterful style.
Born into poverty and segregation in 1912, he experienced the discrimination that was later covered in his work. Later on, Gordon Parks became a key documentarian in the Civil Rights movement and more. One of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, committed to humanitarianism and social justice, Gordon Parks documented American life and culture from the 1940s all the way until the 2000s. His images allowed him to break the color line in professional photography while exploring the social and economic impact of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination.
At times, Parks used his camera to tell us how life was every day. There are the photos from a department store that show where the 'Colored Entrance' is with a woman and her daughter standing outside. There is a sense of the institutionalization of these restrictions in society, that these women were just going about their life and will enter the directed way without incident. But he takes the picture highlighting the juxtaposition of their attitude and an unfair practice. We watch a little black girl with her mother as she looks into a department store window, populated with only white mannequins. The photos are quiet images of people going about their day in worlds that are wildly racist to today's viewer.
In Gordon Park's work, we are as grateful for the everyday documentary images of Black people living in the 40's, 50's, and 60's as we are for his photos of Martin Luther King Jr and Mohammed Ali.
Endia Beal
Jumping waaaaay forward and adjusting for a totally different kind of work, consider the executive portrait photography of Endia Beal. We are entranced with her work, Can I Touch It? The theme is “black” hair and the fascination with it by non-blacks. It looks different and is worn differently, and there is judgment around the choices black women make about it for the workplace.
Beal's portraits are tight, standard vertical headshots. They look like professional portraits in format and style (albeit somewhat dated), down to the mottled grey/blue background. She makes everything feel as though it is done by a normal, run of the mill executive headshot photographer.
So then it hits you, Ms. Beal's subjects, a group of middle aged white women, are wearing decidedly black hairstyles. They range from braids to large and curly. These women all look like professional, mid-career women with their 50's and 60's but it stops you to see these women in these hairstyles.
Beal's photos force a conversation about what kind of hair is appropriate for the workplace and why something that is very much appropriate and in keeping with black hairstyles is somehow jarring – questions about why the women are styled that way arise. A black woman with a white woman's style would not likely get a second look. In this regard, conformity does not work both ways and Ms. Beal helps us think about why.
As New York business headshot photographers, we take particular interest in the fact that Beal chose this type of photography to tell this story. We work with so many people from so many different backgrounds. While this work is an exaggeration, a work of art, it raises our awareness. It helps think about the experience of people of color who trust us to take their photos.
These are just three of many Black photographers that deserve to be highlighted. They have access to worlds that can help us understand something that is different from our own. It is a moving experience to look at this work and we are grateful for their perspective. We look forward to sharing more inspiration and highlighting more photographers of color in the future.