Louis Draper American, 1935-2002

American photographer Louis Draper (1935 - 2002) was a New York-based artist known for his images of Harlem in the 1960s and was a founding member of the influential Kamoinge Workshop. Documenting the lives of Black Americans in New York City as well as iconic figures of the civil rights movement, Draper’s work unequivocally contributed to the critical era of Black American representation in photography. Of his work, Draper wrote; “I want to show the strength, the wisdom, [and] the dignity of the Negro people…I do not want a documentary or sociological statement, I want a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negros which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.”

Born in Virginia in 1935, Draper began pursuing photography while attending Virginia State College (now University) in the early 1950s. He joined the school newspaper, becoming a cameraman for the publication. After being utterly inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 exhibition and accompanying catalogue, The Family of Man, Draper decided to go to New York City to become a photographer. He moved to Harlem in 1957 where he enrolled at the New York Institute of Photography and studied under W. Eugene Smith. Working between Harlem and New Jersey, Draper taught at Mercer County Community College from 1982 to the end of his life in 2002. His resounding influence on the evolution of Black American photography of the 20th century was precipitated in part from his founding of the Kamoinge Workshop in 1960 with Ray Francis. A New York-based collective of Black photographers, Kamoinge, translating to “group effort” from the Gikuyu language of the Kikuyu people in Kenya, grew to include fellow contemporaries Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Danny Dawson, Al Fennar, Herman Howard, Earl James, Jimmy Mannas, Herbert Randall, Herb Robinson, Beuford Smith, Ming Smith, Larry Stewart, Shawn Walker, and Calvin Wilson. The motivation of the Workshop was to avoid prevalent racial stereotypes in contemporary media and the typical violent coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, emphasizing instead the positivity and warmth of Black American communities and individuals, in alignment with the wider acceptance of photography as an artistic medium.

In addition to photographing everyday street-life, Draper’s portraiture and photojournalism for Essence magazine led him to photograph cultural icons such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Langston Hughes. During his lifetime, Draper had solo exhibitions at Image Gallery, New York, and the Photo Workshop Center for Photography, New Jersey. Work from the Kamoinge Workshop, featuring Draper’s photography, has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; the George Eastman House, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The New York Public Library; and Harvard University, among other institutions. Draper’s work is held in several public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the George Eastman House, New York; the Afro-American Museum of Art and Culture, Chicago; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the New York Public Library.