A cache of work and archival materials related to American photographer Shawn Walker, a founding member of the influential Harlem-based black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop, has been acquired by the Library of Congress. Some 100,000 photographs, negatives, and transparencies documenting life in Harlem from the early 1960s through the present is only the eighth complete archive by a single photographer to be purchased by the Library for its collections, and will be the only body of work by an African-American photographer accessible to the public (the archives of Robert H. McNeill are restricted from public display until October 2022).
The library’s acquisition, made in partnership with the Photography Collections Preservation Project, was supplemented by Walker with more than 2,000 prints, audio recordings, and memorabilia produced by early members of the Kamoinge group, including Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, and others.
A Harlem native, Walker began taking photos as a teenager, eventually working as a photographer for a black newspaper. His images, which he refers to as “found objects,” evolved into a visual diary of forgotten inhabitants and iconic leaders of his neighborhood, including portraits of such figures as Jesse Jackson and Toni Morrison. His images of mundane or fleeting subjects—a trumpeter in his ongoing series “Parade,” the turret of a Harlem building, a woman asleep on a tenement stoop—are rendered in his rich aesthetic of deep shadows and stark illumination.
“I have tried to document the world around me, particularly the African-American community, especially in Harlem, from an honest perspective so that our history is not lost,” Walker said in a statement.
A surrealist at heart, the artist recently turned to capturing reflections and abstract textures—a shattered window or a turgid pool of water on the sidewalk. Today, Walker’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. This summer, photographs by Walker and other early members of the Kamoinge collective will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in the exhibition “Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop,” on view from July into October.
