Hervé Escario: A French photographer, Escario specializes in jazz music photography. Having been inspired by jazz since his teenage years, he regularly works with musicians and dancers, blending the two art forms. He was a winner of the Jazz World Photo competition in 2023.

James Van Der Zee’s Photographs: A Portrait of Harlem | National Gallery of Art

Movement in still form - An exhibition of dance photography by Camilla Greenwell - Sadler's Wells Digital Stage

“It’s the photographer’s eye that gives a picture soul and tells a story.”

About — Chuck Stewart Photography

Visual Art – BLACKFISTS

A Legacy in Motion: Muir Mystics Dance Team Brings Kwame Brathwaite’s Vision to Life

Anatholie Music Photography

Photographer James Van Der Zee created an extraordinary chronicle of life in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s and beyond. Residents of this majority Black neighborhood in New York City turned to Van Der Zee and his camera to mark special occasions. His carefully composed, cosmopolitan photographs conveyed the personalities, aspirations, and spirit of his sitters. Some 40 works from the National Gallery’s collection feature Van Der Zee’s studio portraits, along with his photographs of Harlem nightclubs and storefronts as well as religious, social, political, and athletic community groups. Together they provide a glimpse into Harlem’s rich social life as it became an influential center of American culture during the Harlem Renaissance.

On June 7, 2025, the photographer Beuford Smith passed. He had made indelible contributions to the medium in the United States, producing perceptive pictures of everyday life in New York City while shaping supportive infrastructures for Black image-makers.  Smith was self-taught and came into his own as a photographer while participating in the Kamoinge Workshop, a Black photographers’ collective. With a name derived from the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge was founded in 1963 with the aim of providing a shared space for photographic improvement and self-determination—a particularly powerful sentiment given the backdrop of the US Civil Rights movement and decolonization across Africa. As founding member Louis Draper has said, “we saw ourselves as a group who were trying to nurture each other. We had no outlets. The magazines wouldn’t support our work…. We tried to be a force, a means of supporting ourselves and a forum of peers who would view our work with honesty and understanding.

Q&A with Professor of Photography and Kamoinge Inc. Member, Gerald Cyrus

“It all began with a camera. I originally had no intentions of launching a business. But then I decided to turn a hobby into something more. I found my purpose and wanted to share it with the world. How you take a picture is the way you tell your story, it can make all the difference.” CHUCK STEWART

Working with Kamoinge, in 1973 Smith founded the Black Photographers Annual with Joe Crawford. The publication included a range of photographic approaches, and its four issues (1973, 1974, 1976, and 1980) worked to counter the prevailing representations of Black life propagated by mainstream arts institutions and publications. The Annual included essays by literary luminaries such as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, as well as poems penned by Gordon Parks. Photographer and scholar Bill Gaskins recalls,

In These Harlem Jazz Clubs, Musicians and Audience Became One (Published 2018)

Carol Friedman: A New York-based portrait photographer, Friedman has documented jazz musicians for over three decades, with her work featured on numerous album covers. Her images capture the emotion and spontaneity of jazz, which informs the mood of jazz dance.

<n>The Blue Room</n>, an installation by artist <n>Catherine Jansen</n>, 1970-73.

Jazz World Photo &#8211; Photography Jazz &amp; Passion

Some contemporary photographers to check out who have worked in Harlem: Beuford Smith, Jules Allen, Shawn Walker, Ming Smith, Russell Frederick, Dawoud Bey, Jaime Permuth, Isaac Diggs, Andre Wagner.

“I saw Black people in ways I had never seen in photographs through the Annual. Through the best offset printing technology of its time and an elegant book design, I came to see photography as an Art for the first time…the decisive moments I saw in the Annual were like Jazz standards I needed to learn before finding my way of looking at the world through the viewfinder of a camera and transforming what I saw into photographs.”

Camilla Greenwell - Movement in still form - Exhibition guide

“ Photography goes hand in glove with music and it might be fair to say given the somewhat parallel history and evolution of both photography and jazz music that black and white photography and jazz music are synonymous with one another.” OSCAR NOMINATED CINEMATOGRAPHER, HENRY ADEBONOJO

“Less Words, More Eyes”: Remembering Beuford Smith (1936–2025) | Magazine | MoMA

Legendary photographer Kwame Brathwaite of ‘Black is Beautiful’ has passed away at age 85

“Cyrus does not photograph, he captures - the mood, the time, the ambiance. His work from New York’ city’s jazz scene is both impeccable and nostalgic. His eye conveys the energy of the music and subjects perfectly, but he clearly does not fall in love with his greatness. Always working, always pushing for new angles and boundaries, Cyrus’ work is genius.”    -Summers Jackson  Stormy Monday Review

“I'm not a documentarian, I never have been. I think of myself as poetic, a maker of visions, dreams, and a few nightmares.”  Roy DeCarava  Born in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1919, Roy DeCarava came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, when artistic activity and achievement among African Americans flourished across the literary, musical, dramatic, and visual arts. DeCarava did not take up photography until the late 1940s, after working in painting and making prints for the posters division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He used his camera to produce striking studies of everyday black life in Harlem, capturing the varied textures of the neighborhood and the creative efflorescence of the Harlem Renaissance. Resisting explicit politicization, DeCarava  used photography to counter what he described as “black people...not being portrayed in a serious and artistic way.” 1   DeCarava moved fluidly across subjects. In his series The Sound I Saw (begun in 1956, exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983, and published as a book in 2001), he not only chronicled New York jazz luminaries like Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, and John Coltrane, but also captured their influence on visual culture. The deeply personal style of his portraits evinces his sympathy for his subjects. Noting this, publisher and photographer Alan Thomas commented on DeCarava’s “gentle humanism.” 2   DeCarava’s Harlem photography of the late 1940s and early 1950s garnered the attention of Edward Steichen, who was then director of MoMA’s Department of Photography. At Steichen’s urging, DeCarava applied for and won a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in 1952, becoming the first African American photographer to receive this honor. The fellowship enabled him to spend a year shooting hundreds of photographs documenting Harlem life. Steichen included several of DeCarava’s photographs in MoMA’s landmark 1955 exhibition The Family of Man. That same year, DeCarava collaborated with poet, writer, and social activist Langston Hughes to produce The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book featuring 140 of his photographs accompanied by a narrative written by Hughes.  Avoiding the overtly documentary approach evident in the photography of, for instance, James Van Der Zee or Gordon Parks, DeCarava combined pointed political commentary with aesthetic and formal rigor. His attraction to moody lighting and darker tones is clear in works like Man Coming Up Subway Stairs, a photograph for which he spent many hours searching for the perfect subject. As he once described, he strove for “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which...only a Negro photographer [could] interpret.” 3  Note: The opening quote is from Miller, Ivor. “‘If It Hasn’t Been One of Color’: An Interview With Roy DeCarava.” Callaloo 13, no. 4 (1990): 852. https://doi.org/10.2307/2931378.  Swagato Chakravorty, Museum Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Media and Performance Art, 2016  Randy Kennedy, “Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, Dies at 89,” New York Times, October 28, 2009, accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/arts/29decarava.html.   Alan Thomas, “Literary Snapshots of the Sho-Nuff Blues,” In These Times, March 27–April 2, 1985, 21.   Randy Kennedy, “Roy DeCarava, Harlem Insider Who Photographed Ordinary Life, Dies at 89,” New York Times, October 28, 2009, accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/arts/29decarava.html.

His peers echo this sentiment. Adger Cowans notes that Smith was a “true artist. His photographs cannot be understood at first glance.” Marilyn Nance thinks of them as “humorous, but deep,” while C. Danny Dawson emphasizes how Smith “had a way of playing with things so that they could be halfway between a kind of realistic depiction and an abstraction.” This complicated, emotive spirit—simultaneously beautiful and painful, comforting yet strange—is threaded through Smith’s pictures, which mine the histories of oppression manifested in everyday life in the US. One of his most memorable photographs shows a young Black man in Harlem, his eyes streaming with tears as he witnesses a white delivery man being beaten on 125th Street. Smith made the picture on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.

I prefer the black-and-white aesthetic because of the tonalities I can exploit, and because it focuses the viewer’s attention on the underlining meanings of the image. - Gerald Cyrus

Roy DeCarava | MoMA

Above All, Enjoy The Music: Photographs by Herman Leonard — The Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art

“It’s probably easier to ask me whom haven’t I photographed then to tell you who I have. But if there’s a historic moment in American music, social or cultural history that you’re curious about, chances are I was there or have photographs of somebody who was.” — CHUCK STEWART