A Wealth of Stories about the Art World

Anthony Barboza is a celebrated artist and writer who has made thousands of photographs in the studio and on the street since 1963.

A few years after his career began in his early 20s, Barboza was photographing Miles Davis, Blondie, Gordon Parks, as well as other artists for institutions like Harper’s Bazaar, Coca-Cola, and the New York Times.

That body of work–ranging from commercial to surrealist photography–made it into countless homes through advertisements and publications. It is now collected in Eye Dreaming, a new Getty publication and the artist’s first monograph.

While commercially successful, Barboza continues to use his art “to honor artists that are not always known to the general public,” a sentiment he shares with Getty curator Mazie M. Harris in the book’s intimate interview.

“When I was growing up, there were so few Black people on TV and in movies. So I get really excited about doing certain photographs and albums. It can never go away once you do it. All these things I did, they’re historical now. It’s important to do things that are positive about my own race.”

His Black Borders series, which received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980, captured storied culture makers like Gordon Parks, Debbie Allen, Erykah Badu, and Miriam Makeba.

Each captured something unique about its subject. Here, playwright and poet Ntozake Shange is blurred to capture the duality of her medium.

“You see two heads. The one you see clearer is the one in which she’s quiet and closing her eyes, and the other one is her emotion… Writers have always interested me because they use words to create visuals in your mind. It’s unlike other art forms.”

Barboza calls his inimitable, highly intuitive process “eye dreaming,” or “a state of mind that’s almost like meditation.”

That intuition sometimes helped launch the careers of his subjects.

This photograph of model and performer Grace Jones was a test image taken by Barboza during her very first photoshoot. Months later, he hired her for an Essence shoot that helped her break into the modeling industry.

Future supermodel Pat Evans, captured here with singer Isaac Hayes, asked Barboza to shoot her first portfolio. Barboza shared those photos with ad agencies he worked for, and Evans began working with Helmut Newton and modeling for Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, and Christian Dior.

Barboza was also Blondie’s first professional shoot. The images he took of Debbie Harry for Crawdaddy magazine eventually became the cover for her album Rapture.

His street photography produced powerful images, sensitively registering Black life in the mid-20th century in conjunction with the other members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a photography collective recently featured in the Getty exhibition Working Together.