Can You Find the Music in This Photograph?

“Music is the highest art form because it goes so far back before anything else came about… it vibrates the bones and makes you move.”

Those are the words of Anthony Barboza, one of the original members of the Kamoinge Workshop, subject of a new Getty exhibition Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop. In a series of recent videos, the Kamoinge artists talked about the fascinating and complex musicality of their work.

The quotes below are taken from those conversations.

The 1960s was a decade of jazz: defiant jazz that accompanied the struggle for equal rights, and inventive jazz that changed the genre. Jazz superstars like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Nina Simone created music that shook the world.

That musical milieu shaped the members of the Kamoinge Workshop in fascinating ways.

Each member of the Kamoinge Workshop had their own way of incorporating their musical influences into their work. 

Kamoinge member Anthony Barboza sees music in the way his subjects move.

“I mean, to me Harlem”—the Kamoinge Workshop’s base of operations—“is any Black person walking the streets anywhere,” says Barboza. “You already pick up the rhythm of them walking. The rhythm of us on the street, even talking. Like they say, the Italians talk with their hands. Well we talk with our bodies. That's what I always felt.”

The members of the Kamoinge Workshop weren’t just jazz fans, they were jazz enthusiasts. They knew musicians by sound, and quizzed each other in meetings which, says Walker, “were musical.”

“Somebody would come and play a brand new album and put it on and say ‘Who is that playing?’ If you knew who the lead person was, then who were all of the side men that were playing… this is what we did at our meetings. So I am trying to tell you how much of a part of the meetings that music was.”

Similarly, their photography has musical layers hidden in the medium.  Photos like Footsteps by Adger Cowans are more than what they seem. 

“A lot of people bought it because it’s a Black man in a white world,” says Cowans. Okay, symbolism, you know. But like, basically, it’s the footsteps in the snow—this guy walking. He’s—you can see he’s (humming)... I think all the photographs that I take have to have, for me, this sense of time and this sense of the feeling.”

“Music was the biggest inspiration for my work, and when I shoot and I develop I always had music on whether it was jazz or blues,” says Kamoinge member Ming Smith.

For America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, that music was the work of Billie Holiday: “I wanted the work to feel like a Billie Holiday song, the emotion and everything that Billie Holiday was about. She's also very political and she had a great feeling and I felt her.”

The Kamoinge Workshop also captured some of the jazz greats that inspired them. This photograph of Sun Ra–whose avant-garde jazz linked the Black experience to Egyptian mythology and outer space–was taken by Smith.

Smith shares her anecdote in Getty’s audio guide for Working Together. Download the Getty Guide to hear it when you visit the exhibition.

“He’s like a visionary. So, I was trying to capture, you know, the feeling of Sun Ra in those photographs,” says Smith. This photograph captures his shimmering cape and appears to scatter a glittering constellation of light and dark in his wake.

After sneaking into the Village Vanguard jazz club to see Miles Davis perform, Herb Robinson saw “Miles starting to walk from the stage to the back and as he’s walking, I’m trailing—stalking him, basically.

“And Miles felt me behind him, and Miles turned, and when he turned it was perfect. And he, Miles, took his fist and he said, ‘What the f-?’ I only could get one shot, you know—‘click.’ I do remember, I went home and then I saw—when it came up I said, “Oh my god.”