Photographer and artist Ming Smith was born in Detroit in 1947. After attending Howard University in Washington, DC, where she studied microbiology and chemistry, Smith moved to New York City. Already an enthusiast of photography, she worked as a model and made pictures in the streets, which led her to meet other photographers, including Anthony Barboza and Louis Draper. They invited her to join the Kamoinge Workshop in 1972, and she became the first female member of the group. According to art historian Oluremi Onabanjo, it was within Kamoinge that Smith “cut her teeth as a photographer and sharpened her conceptual focus, mining the structural and psychological tensions that animate experiences of Blackness.” She was also the first Black woman artist whose work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her photographs are also in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, National Museum of African-American History and Culture, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Smith’s work recently was included in the traveling exhibitions We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017) and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2019).

Photographer and abstract painter Adger Cowans was born in 1936 in Columbus, Ohio. Influenced by photographers in his family, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in photography from Ohio Univer­sity in 1958, where he studied with Clarence H. White Jr. Disillusioned by racial injustices in the US South as well as locally, and in search of a Black mentor, Cowans left for New York and called Gordon Parks, whom he had met once before. Parks welcomed Cowans into his home and brought him along on Life assignments that summer. He said that “Gordon’s big lesson was taking anger and transforming it into work.” Cowans was then drafted into the US Navy and at the end of his service, in 1960, he returned to New York, where he cofounded the Kamoinge Workshop in 1963. He was honored with the “Lo­renzo il Magnifico” Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2001 Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Shawn Walker was born in 1940 and raised in Harlem. He started making pictures around 1963, and later obtained a degree in pho­tography from Empire State College. In 1963, Walker was also invited to join the new Kamoinge Workshop, becoming a founding member. Shortly thereafter, in 1965, he joined Third World Newsreel and began to travel internationally, including to Cuba, where he worked as a cinematographer and photographer. He would continue to travel and photograph globally, including in Guyana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Mexico. But he always called Harlem home and has photographed life in the neighborhood for more than fifty years. Walker taught at the City University of New York and the International Center of Photography, among other places, and dedicated some forty years of his life to education. In 2020, his photographic work and his extensive archive of the Kamoinge Workshop were acquired by the Library of Congress, the first for a Black photographer. work and his extensive archive of the Kamoinge Workshop were acquired by the Library of Congress, the first for a Black photographer.

Anthony Barboza was born in 1944 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. At age nineteen, he moved to New York and worked as an apprentice to photographer Hugh Bell. Following an invitation from Adger Cowans, Barboza joined the Kamoinge Workshop. In 1965, he was drafted into the army and moved to Florida, where he continued honing his practice and worked full-time for the Jackson­ville newspaper The Gosport. After his return to New York, he set up his own photography studio on West Twenty-Third Street. His commercial career began to take off, and he photographed nota­ble figures such as James Baldwin, Miles Davis, and Grace Jones, among many others. In 1970, he began to make pictures for Essence magazine. Commenting on Barboza and his pictures, cultural critic Hilton Als wrote, “He does not try to provide answers; that would make the pictures dead. What’s alive in them are the stories behind the images.”

Born in New York City in 1953, Marilyn Nance attended Bronx High School of Science and New York University and earned a BFA in graphic design from Pratt University in 1976. For decades, Nance has photographed Black culture in the United States and abroad, including in New Orleans; Sheldon, North Carolina; and Rio de Janeiro. In 1977, she was the official photographer for the North American Zone of FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Cul­ture, a Pan-African festival held in Lagos, Nigeria, creating one of the most complete photographic records of the event. In the mid-1990s, Nance began doing pioneering work in the emerging digital realm. In 1995, she created the still-active website Soulsista, became one of the first online DJs in 1996, and graduated from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 1998. As curator of photography for the New York Public Library’s Digital Schomburg web project, she selected more than five hundred pictures of African Americans from various New York Public Libraries research centers for digitization. Nance’s photographs were featured in the third volume of the influential Black Photographers Annual (1976). In 2022, her FESTAC ’77 photographs were published in book form as Last Day in Lagos.