Hello, my name is Jeff Burkhart and I am a Gallery Attendant at the museum. I will be reading the Community section text for Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.

Kamoinge members committed to portraying the communities around them from the first year of the Workshop’s existence. As member Louis Draper explained in a later account of the group’s history:

Cognizant of the forces for change revolving around Kamoinge, we dedicated ourselves to speak of our lives as only we can. This was our story to tell and we set out to create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.

Kamoinge artists portrayed people of all ages at play, work, rest, or travel within the city, evoking the physicality, rhythms, visual environments and emotional life of neighborhoods of which they were a part. They also depicted intimates and friends in portraits and interior views reflecting a range of feelings and relationships.

Often, the photographers made split-second decisions about when to click the camera’s shutter rather than devising compositions in advance—a mode of working they connected to the improvisational nature of jazz as well as the history of art.  Photographers including Roy DeCarava, W.  Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Hugh Bell, Dorothea Lange and Eikoh Hosoe were influences for Kamoinge artists. These figures had in common a concern for speaking about human life through picture-making practices that combined personal response with sensitive observation of the social world.

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