Jimmie Mannas American, b. 1941

Jimmie Mannas (b. 1941) is a photographer and filmmaker and one of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, the collective formed in New York in 1963 through the merger of two groups of Black photographers. Named after a Kikuyu word for a group of people acting together, Kamoinge brought a collective purpose to a generation of artists determined to establish photography as an art form. Mannas’s work spans Black street life in New York, the avant-garde jazz musicians and dancers of the 1960s, and the five years he spent in Guyana after its independence. His filmmaking developed alongside his photography, from documenting the first Ali–Frazier fight to writing and directing a feature film of his own.

Born in Newark, Mannas earned a degree from the New York Institute of Photography in 1960, then studied film editing at the School of Visual Arts and film and television at New York University. He was among the photographers who gathered informally on Sunday evenings with Louis Draper, Al Fennar, and Herbert Randall, a circle that came to call itself Kamoinge. When the group merged with Group 35 in 1963, Mannas became a founding member of the Workshop. He also helped bring Shawn Walker back to photography, telling him about a meeting of Black photographers he ought to attend.

For Mannas, the Workshop’s responsibilities extended beyond making photographs, critiquing one another’s work, and organizing exhibitions. As he later put it, the group had to do more than take pictures. He put that conviction into practice, directing the photography department at Youth in Action in Brooklyn from 1965 to 1967. In 1971, he moved to Guyana, where he worked as a photographer and filmmaker for the Ministry of Information until 1976. The photographs made there form the largest body of work from those years. They include Bag Ladies, Matthew Ridge (1972), Recess, Bishops All Girls High School (1973), and Peeping Seawall Beach Boy, made along the sea wall built by the British to protect Georgetown from flooding. Mannas likened the seawall on a Sunday afternoon to the edge of Central Park. Jazz, which inspired several Kamoinge members to travel abroad, also runs through his New York photographs, from the avant-garde musicians to the dancers of the 1960s.

Mannas’s film work includes The Fight, made in 1971 around the first Ali–Frazier bout, on which he served as producer and cameraman. In 1976, he produced, directed, and wrote Aggro Seizeman, the first feature film made in Guyana. After returning to New York, he directed the film cooperative New Images and continued his photographic practice.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery represents Mannas. His photographs were included in Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2020 and presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.