Herb Robinson American, b. 1942

Herb Robinson (b. 1942) has photographed the human experience for more than fifty years. One of the original members of the Kamoinge Workshop, the Black photographers’ collective founded in New York in 1963, he belongs to a group that has become the longest running of its kind in the world. Born in Kingston and brought to New York as a child, Robinson has worked across black-and-white street photography, abstraction, and portraiture, drawing on the influence of Roy DeCarava, while building an extensive body of work in Jamaica. “My instrument is the camera,” he has said, “the vessel that responds to and carries my emotions.”

Robinson came to New York from Kingston at the age of five and studied at City College of New York and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Trained as a still-life photographer, he went on to establish his own commercial studio in the city. He joined Kamoinge late in 1963, alongside David Carter, Adger Cowans, and Anthony Barboza, and later served as the group’s treasurer. Roy DeCarava was Kamoinge’s first director, serving until 1965.

Kamoinge takes its name from a Kikuyu word meaning a group of people acting together. Its members gathered to talk, listen to jazz, debate politics, and critique one another’s work, insisting on photography as an art form at a time when few galleries would exhibit their work. The collective’s mission was to honor, document, preserve, and represent the history and culture of the African diaspora through the lens of Black photographers. In 1965, the group opened the Kamoinge Gallery in a brownstone at 248 West 139th Street in Harlem, presenting exhibitions including Theme Black and The Negro Woman.

Cinema, painting, and jazz have all shaped Robinson’s work. Rubens, El Greco, Chardin, and Vermeer informed his sense of composition and his treatment of light, while the jazz played by his neighbors, many of them well-known musicians, brought a spontaneity that runs through both his early street photographs and his more recent series. Through framing, deliberate blur, and the tension at the edges of the image, his photographs open onto an abstract, at times surreal dimension within the rhythms of ordinary city life.

Robinson’s work was included in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which opened at Tate Modern in 2017 before travelling to Crystal Bridges, the Brooklyn Museum, The Broad, the de Young, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was also featured in Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and presented at the Whitney, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, as well as Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 at the National Gallery of Art in 2025. His photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.