Louis Draper

“For some reason somebody had left a copy of The Family of Man on a bed. I lived in the dorm with four other people, none of whom owned up to it. So, I have no idea to this day who left that copy on my bed. But that was the first beginning of my photography education. I read it practically all night. Instead of studying for my exam, I read The Family of Man. I was just enthralled by that book.”¹

Louis Draper recalled this memory from his days as a student at Virginia State College (now University). In 1953, he enrolled at the historically Black college in Petersburg, which was not far from his hometown of Richmond. He began working as a reporter for the school paper, and during that time Draper’s father, who was an amateur photographer himself, sent Louis his first camera. By 1956, Draper’s title at the paper had changed to cameraman. After his revelatory first experience with The Family of Man, a catalogue that accompanied the 1955 photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, he decided to leave school during his final semester and move to New York City to become a photographer. Once there, Draper enrolled in a photography workshop led by Harold Feinstein, and was mentored by W. Eugene Smith, one of the most prominent American photojournalists.

In 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York–based collective of Black photographers. Workshop members met regularly to discuss one another’s work, produced group portfolios, exhibitions, and publications, and mentored young people all over the city. Draper emerged as one of the group’s teachers, which began his long career as an educator (he worked in numerous teaching roles, including at Pratt Institute and Mercer County Community College). The collective aimed 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.”² Kamoinge members wanted to avoid the racial stereotypes prevalent in the media and the violence that was typical of journalistic coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, working instead to represent their communities in a positive light.

The first portfolio Kamoinge produced, in 1964, showcased black-and-white photographs by 14 members, including an untitled photograph by Draper of a young Black boy. (Children were one of Draper’s favorite subjects, and were featured prominently in The Family of Man catalogue, too.) In Draper’s portrait, the boy wears a striped button-down shirt that’s wrinkled and slightly torn at the pocket. Though his expression is difficult to interpret, the boy’s body language is confident. It was no accident that half of the photographs in the first Kamoinge portfolio were images of happy or content children; the photographers wanted to avoid stereotypical imagery of sad, poverty-stricken Black children meant to elicit sympathy and pity. Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, curator of the traveling exhibition Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop, wrote, “Through all of its various activities, Kamoinge participated in and helped to shape a critical era of Black self-determination in the 1960s and 1970s. This period coincided with a pivotal shift in photography’s wider cultural and institutional acceptance as a powerful artistic medium.” Draper remained closely tied to Kamoinge for the rest of his life, and the group maintains their commitment to photography to this day.

Note: opening quote is from Duganne, Erina. “The Kamoinge Workshop in Context: An Interview with Louis Draper, Albert Fennar, Beuford Smith.” In exposure, The Journal of the Society of Photographic Education, Spring 2011, Vol. 44:1, p. 8.

Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Department of Photography, 2021