Corio entered the club and snapped a shot of b-boys practicing their moves, one of which was the Roxy’s resident DJ, Grand Mixer D.St, which later appeared on the cover of Fans and Clubbers 1978–1995 (Cafe Royal Books). “There was barely any Hip Hop being played on the radio,” Corio remembers. “I had been to a tiny Hip Hop club in London a few times and Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five had played in London six months earlier but the music was still largely unknown and unheard.” The only way for most people to follow the scene was to catch it live.

As a regular contributor to music mags like New Musical Express (NME), Corio had established himself at the forefront of the UK’s soul and reggae scenes. Hip Hop was a natural continuum, which he chronicled on both sides of the Atlantic. On November 23, 1982, the New York City Rap Tour crossed the pond, bringing the four elements of Hip Hop to London for the first time in a single showcase at the Venue, an old cinema in Victoria. “There was an amazing energy the whole night,” Corio says. “I think the audience quickly became aware that something groundbreaking was happening before their eyes.” The main stage featured Africa Bambaataa and Grand Mixer D.St on the wheels of steel, in front of a massive backdrop being painted by FUTURA, DONDI, PHASE II, and Rammellzee.

There was a second stage in the round featuring Rock Steady Crew and Double Dutch girls. “For me, breakdancing was the most impressive thing on a photographic level,” Corio says. “Frosty Freeze, Ken Swift and Crazy Legs were all quite different and had amazing moves. It was acrobatics, contortionism, and high energy moving to wild beats. It was electrifying to watch, and the audience were dumb-founded, I think. It’s hard to overstate how important this show was. The music press here regarded Hip Hop as a fad that would last for a year or two and then disappear.”

But they were wrong, as the establishment so often is. Instead, Hip Hop spread through London, taking root in the clubs and pirate radio shows where it flourished despite minimal commercial success. This is where Hip-Hop in London 1982–1994 (Cafe Royal Books), begins. Corio returns to his archive, bringing together images of Run DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and Juice Crew All Stars Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Marley Marl, MC Shan, and Roxanne Shanté made on the streets of London and at the shows for an intimate look at the dawn of Hip Hop’s rise to global domination.

It was another era as Corio’s photograph of the Fat Boys attests, as they rock the mic wearing matching satin jackets and coon skin caps at a local Pizza Express to promote their new single, “All You Can Eat.” Corio remembers when the PA (personal appearance) was a common event. “If an artist was in town for a few days to plug their new single, they might not have enough material or proper backing to do a whole show. Acts would perform to a backing track, do a couple of tunes, and then on to the next venue,” he explains. “This was a meet and greet (and eat!) event at lunchtime.”

But perhaps it is his photo session with Biz Markie at Kensington Court that best embodies the spirit of the times. When the Cold Chillin ‘88 Tour came to town, Corio was given 30 minutes to photograph Marley Marl, Big Daddy Kane, MC Shan and Biz so he took them out of the record company offices one by one for a 10-minute portrait session on the street. Kane was calm, cool, and collected and Shan hit the lamppost like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, while Marley Marl posted up on a Mercedes looking like time is money and there was work to be done.

But “Biz was a photographer’s dream,” Corio says. “He hammed it up for the camera, pulling a different pose for each shot. He climbed on to the hood of a parked BMW and leapt off with his rope chains flying, then stuck his face a couple of inches away from the camera, pulling faces and sticking his tongue out. I didn’t need to give him any direction at all and managed to shoot off a whole roll of film in barely a minute or two. Big Daddy Kane by contrast was silent and immobile but he had such an imposing character he was good to photograph in a very different way.”

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[Take a deep breath]
[Exhale]
[Drop your shoulders]
[Close your eyes]

These words, chosen to introduce In Minor Keys by the late Koyo Kouoh, are an elegiac invocation from the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale. Although Kouoh would pass just one year before the 61st edition of the fabled festival opened on May 9, her vision meets the moment without pandering to the geopolitical currents shaping the contemporary art world. Here, art is restored to its rightful place as “thresholds between lifeworlds and temporalities” that exist only in the object itself.

Kouoh’s words are an invocation and a release, an invitation to step away from the known and enter a world of imagination where our very presence fills in the blanks. It is a sentiment that lies at the heart of Fragments of Light, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno’s new exhibition presented at Palazzo Bembo during Personal Structures: Confluences, which runs parallel with the Biennale. Curated by the artist in collaboration architect Danilo Vespier, and art historian Andrea Verganti, the exhibition showcases Cattaneo Adorno’s transformative approach to street photography, enveloping us in a mellifluous blend of sight, sound, and motion to explore the inherent fragility and unstable experience of perception.

After taking up photography at age 60 in 2013, Cattaneo Adorno has used the camera as her compass to move throughout the world, fostering a sense of belonging through the act of making art that evokes the glittering sun, sand, and surf of her native Rio de Janeiro. Fragments of Light picks up where her previous works — Águas de Ouro, Scarti di Tempo, and Ten Years — left off, pushing the boundaries of street photography into new realms while combining playful curiosity with a bittersweet yearning that Brazilians call saudade, melancholic feelings of nostalgia for a love long gone.

It’s an apt meditation of inherent fragility of our present times while offering a paradigm shift: letting go and following your heart. Here Cattaneo Adorno reflects on her journey as an artist and creating work that brings to life Koyo Kouoh’s idea of “an exhibition that invites listening to the persistent signals of earth and life, connecting to soul frequencies.”

Please take us back to 2013, when you took your first photography workshop with Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, and describe the moment when you fell in love with photography.

Sandra Cattaneo Adorno: It was my daughter Gwen who invited me to join her in the workshop run by Alex and Rebecca as a present for my 60th birthday. I didn’t know what to expect, but I accepted because I thought it could be a good excuse to spend some time with her. At first, I didn’t know what to do with my camera and the technical side of taking pictures felt really daunting. All the other participants were much more advanced than me, I must have been the worst in the class! But as I found myself out in the street and looked through the viewfinder, something clicked. It is difficult to explain precisely what happened, but I felt a buzz running through me. It was both a challenge and a joy, and I wanted more of it.

What drew you to street photography and the freedom of creating work wherever you are?

For me the biggest excitement of photography lies in framing a scene that is unpredictable and uncontrollable. It rests in the alertness of being in the moment and capturing that split second in which everything – people, gestures, colors, shapes – come together in a meaningful composition. Before I started photographing, the street was for me a place that I used to go from A to B without being too conscious of what was happening around me. Now it is a bit like a canvas where infinite possibilities might unfold.

What inspired you to work in metallic gold and silver inks to create Águas de Ouro (Portuguese for “waters of gold”)?

I wanted to create a dreamlike atmosphere that could evoke both my memories of Ipanema and the joyous experience of the people who visit the beach now. The book was printed using three different kinds of metallic ink techniques: golden ink on black paper, four colors on a silver base, and blue ink on white paper. It was a bit of a leap of faith, as even the printers had never used this technology before, but it was a fun experience and I am very pleased with the result.

What drew you to explore the more abstract elements of photography for Scarti di Tempo (Italian for “scraps of time”)?

With Scarti di Tempo, I pushed the subjective quality of my photos even further, creating images that were very abstract and mysterious. I have always enjoyed playing with what is real and what isn’t in a photograph, to make the viewers challenge what they are seeing. When the pandemic hit in 2020, this interest became more compelling, as the world around me felt increasingly absurd and detached from reality. I wanted to convey part of this estrangement in the book, while also celebrating the ability of photography to evoke a sense of mystery and wonder.

Where your last book, Ten Years, is printed in gold like the sun, your new exhibition, Fragments of Light, is silver like the moon. How has seeing your work printed in different colors and tones deepened your understanding of photography?

I am naturally drawn to color when I photograph, maybe because I was surrounded by so many strong hues when I was growing up in Brazil. I found it fascinating to explore the possibilities offered by changing the way that a photo looks when printed. Depriving an image of color makes it more abstract in a timeless way, but while the golden ink I used in Ten Years felt more celebratory, the silver one of Fragments of Light is more subjective, so the visitors can tinge it with their own emotions.
My wish is to activate the imagination of the visitors, making them interact with my work with fresh eyes, without preconceived ideas as to what they will see or experience. I believe that one of the most powerful aspects of art rests in its ambiguity and its ability to evoke a sense of mystery and wonder; I might want to ask some questions, but I am not interested in providing the answers.

Photos courtesy Robert Mann Gallery

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On January 26, Lowell Fillmore “Sly” Dunbar joined the ancestors at age 73, after blazing a singular trail as the greatest reggae drummer of all time from his native Kingston, Jamaica. For nearly half a century Dunbar and partner bassist Robbie Shakespeare, who died in 2021, stood at the forefront of a musical revolution. Together, as Sly & Robbie, they bridged reggae, dancehall, rocksteady, and ska with R&B, funk, rock, and pop to redefine the sound of modern life.

Dunbar, who got his start with Peter Tosh, went on to drum for everyone from Grace Jones, Dennis Brown, and Jimmy Cliff to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Sinéad O’Connor. His music became a fixture in the life of many, including photographer Deirdre O’Callaghan, who photographed and interviewed him in 2014 for her new book, The Drum Thing (Prestel). “Reggae was a constant throughout my teen years at home — Burning Spear, Junior Murvin, Peter Tosh, Ini Kamoze, Yellowman coming from my brother’s bedroom. Every Thursday, my brother and his friends put on a reggae night at the Donkeys Ears pub in Cork, Ireland. Every week that whole place was heaving,” O’Callaghan remembers.

Her love for the music brought O’Callaghan to Jamaica, where she photographed Dunbar at Anchor Studios, as well as his compatriot, Studio One session drummer Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace at home tearing it up. Now O’Callaghan shares an exclusive excerpt from her interview with Dunbar reminiscing on his early days getting started. “Sly was so cool, he was practically gliding along the floor. And that accent!” O’Callaghan says. “I can still hear Sly talking about Earl Young of the Trammps, who I had just photographed the previous month (at his home in Philadelphia). There’s a thread throughout the book that connects the musicians to one another. I love that.”

Sly Dunbar on The Drum Thing:

“Earl Young is wicked, man. He’s one of my favorites. I got a lot of ideas from him, just the way he plays and the way he approach his sound, very steady. I listen to him a lot because I listen to a lot of Philadelphia, because I like RnB. I listen to all these people and I learn from them — some of the other Jamaican drummers like Mikey Boo, Phil Callender, Horsemouth himself, Paul Douglas, Santa [Carlton ‘Santa’ Davis]. So with all these people around, because I was like the last drummer that came in to play, I was the little one. And also Carlton Barrett from the Wailers, we were youngest. I tried to listen to a lot of this music and then I realized that I had to create a style and a sound for myself, and I wondered, how am I going to go about it, because these are some great drummers. I didn’t know if I could survive.

“When the Philly sound came in, I started listening to what Earl Young was doing… But what really helped me is like, after I played on Double Barrel [by Dave and Ansel Collins], there was a lull and then we went to Channel One recording studio. We used to beg free time whenever we didn’t have any money; we wanted to record ourselves. Ernest [Hoo Kim] would give us the time, and then in return I would make a track for Ernest and say, ‘This is your track.’ So the track I made for Ernest was ‘When the Right Time Comes’, which The Diamonds sang on, and he couldn’t believe it.

“Eventually it became a big, big hit, and the drum style that I played on it, everybody was saying, ‘No, this is a trick, he’s a boy, he’s not playing it like that live, man.’ Nobody believe, and so people used to come to the studio and try and peep in to see what I was doing. After this, Joseph [Hoo Kim] and Ernest from Channel One, they gave me the go ahead — they said, ‘Sly, it’s all yours, do what you want in it.’ So we used to listen to a lot of the Philadelphia records, and we used to try and get the same drum sound that Earl Young used to have. He’s one of my mentors, I respect him very much.”

The Drum Thing by Deirdre O’Callaghan. Published by Prestel, April 14th, 2026.

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Live Evil, a palindrome as elegant as it is profound, is stamped into the boards of filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa’s new book. It’s the title of an album Miles Davis invoked in 1971, while playing at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. Jazz had been institutionalized, rendered respectable, and refurbished as a proper member of the establishment. But the essence of jazz was innovation and experimentation, a call to creation that he would protect by summoning chaos in its stead, like Jesus flipping tables to drive moneylenders out of the temple.

In 1982 Black Sabbath took the title “Live Evil” as their own, embracing the blasphemous barbarism of the colonial mind as their birthright. For Jafa, these two sides of the same coin coexist across a continuum, inextricably intertwined, yet not always visible to the naked eye. As a seer, Jafa crafts radical panoramas that liberate us from the prisons of the mind, playing with images as a jazz musician plays notes: melodic, harmonic and jarring, tempo shifting, discordant truths that flow together into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Born and raised in Mississippi, Jafa got his start working as a cinematographer on groundbreaking films like Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) before stepping into his own with Love Is the Message, The Message is Death in 2016. In the seven-minute film, Jafa unloads the clip, firing off 150 scenes of Black American life, drawn from YouTube videos that have become part of the endless scroll. Police brutality, domestic terrorism, and political uprisings appear alongside images of Martin Luther King Jr., LeBron James, and Barack Obama, while Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” plays. “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?” a woman in the film asks.

Throughout his career, Jafa has confronted the vicious history of state-sanctioned violence against Black America, and the ways in which art, music, and culture have become a tool of survival against oppression. With Live Evil, which began as a 2022 exhibition at LUMA Arles in France, Jafa reflects on these themes through our layered experience of images, and the ways in which they can be used to subvert and upend the very racist dog whistles they were designed to reinforce.

“In writing of Black America’s ongoing saga of triumphs, traumas, and travails, James Baldwin declared ‘ours is a story that must be told again and again,’” legendary critic Greg Tate wrote in an essay included in the book. In Jafa’s hands, art, culture, and community became lifelines of survival, connecting people across space and time to freedom, beauty, and truth. “It seems to me that we’re in a state of perpetual post traumatic stress,” Jafa observed. “It’s like an epidemic that’s happening to us, but it’s not happening to the people around us. Therefore, our responses are really peculiar. Sometimes they seem like genius, sometimes they seem like psychosis. But it’s a very weird thing when you’re in the midst of an ongoing, somewhat phantom epidemic that’s not being treated like an epidemic even though we have experienced it as one.”

Therein lies the rub: homegrown fascism takes anti-blackness as its starting point so that the structures that uphold it are synonymous with democracy itself. One good shake of the tree and the root rot begins to show, revealing liberals and conservatives as two sides of the same coin. When domestic policy is rooted in racism but its history is obscured (ie. health insurance tied to employment), those whose foothold in privilege precipitously begins to slip may speak of living in a “dystopia” in a futile attempt to deny the complicity they once enjoyed with impunity.

But Jafa refuses to play along. Instead he looks at the space where Miles Davis and Ozzy Osbourne co-exist, where existence is resistance and refusal is a gift. As Norman Ajari wrote in the book, “Waiting for the huge revolution that will bring them down, Jafa’s work directly makes the choice to look at this world of opposition and dehumanization, but above all to explore the infinite creativity, the immense aesthetic power, the incalculable subjective intensity that comes to life deep within its interstices. From these tensions Jafa multiplies the combinations; so that evil lives.”

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The untimely death of Michael Eugene Archer, better known to the world as D’Angelo, on October 14 marks the passing of not just a man but an era unto itself. In his 51 years on earth, D’Angelo created just three albums — Black Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000), and Black Messiah (2012) — each revolutionizing the sound of the times, much like his idol, Prince. The singer, songwriter, musician, and producer emerged at age 21 on the global stage with his first album, “Brown Sugar,” which dropped July 3, 1995, at the height of Hip Hop’s golden age. With his crisp straightbacks and leather trench, D’Angelo was the epitome of Black cool, driven by a love for music far greater than the trappings of fame, fortune, and wealth. His arrival signified a new generation of R&B that would blossom into NeoSoul throughout the second half of the decade.

Photographer Jamil GS remembers ’95 as an extraordinary time of innovation, creativity, and style. That July, he had back to back sessions with artists just getting their start including D’Angelo, Mos Def, Jay Z, Jeru the Damaja, Ghostface and Raekwon. “The reason I gravitated to working with musicians was my love of music and respect for the people producing it,” says Jamil, whose father, jazz saxophonist Sahib Shahib, played with Thelonious Monk, Quincy Jones, and John Coltrane. Growing up in Copenhagen surrounded by music, Jamil was drawn to Hip Hop, writing graffiti before taking up photography. He moved to New York, his father’s hometown, in 1990, and soon began shooting for magazines including i-D, Dazed, and The Face.

“That was the beginning of my journey as a photographer. I was working out of my apartment, but I took to the streets and made that my studio,” Jamil says. “There was no playbook yet. Everything that was Black became ‘urban’ and art departments at the labels were looking at stuff someone else had done, like ohh that sticks. My approach was different. The experiences I had of the music were sonically so rich and valuable that I wanted to do my part to uphold it and share that with the world.”

He received a commission from The Face to photograph a new artist on the come up named D’Angelo. “When I first heard him, I was like, who’s this cat sounding like a young Marvin Gaye?” Jamil remembers. “Then I heard more and felt the edge, how the production had the street element, the twang of the times, and that he hailed from the South. I wanted to shoot him somewhere that resonated. My grandparents and my father came from the South and settled in Harlem, and I wanted to trace some of those footsteps.” Jamil headed uptown and scouted locales that read as Uptown Classic at first glance: Lucky Spot on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue; 125th Street and Lexington Avenue; 116th and Fifth Avenue; and a corner with Dragon, a Chinese restaurant that still had a colorful spray of flags hanging overhead. They met on a weekday afternoon as the golden hour approached. “I loved shooting in the afternoon sun,” Jamil says. “I like the magical glow and felt like D’Angelo’s sound represented that; it was really warm, spiritual, human. His whole vibe was like the sound of an afternoon song.”

Jamil’s approach to shooting was simple and understated. He asked D’Angelo’s publicist and label rep to wait inside their van to avoid drawing attention to the photo shoots. “Still it was Harlem, and people are curious,” he says. “I had a big camera and people thought it was a film camera, like we were shooting a movie. Quickly a crowd would gather, and then a few people asked, ‘Are you that ‘Brown Sugar’ guy?’ It was that new. They didn’t know his name yet.”

But soon the world would learn it, and learn it well — D’Angelo, artist, musician, poet whose devotion to craft embodied the ethos, “less is more” like no one else. With his passing, we are reminded of what matters most: love, care, and respect as stewards of the earth. “There’s a movement now, slow living, which is basically what it was like back then: when you avoid distractions and focus on diving deeper,” Jamil says. “D’Angelo is a great example of what is possible when you do that. His music is going to stay forever.”

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Fifty years after Jamel Shabazz first started making photographs, he returns to his roots with Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025 (Prestel) — the place where it all began. As a young boy first learning the landscape of Red Hook, Brooklyn, during the 1960s, Shabazz remembers the after school visits to the park filled with the magic and wonder of discovery of the natural world that lay just beyond its 19th-century stone masonry walls. Just a century earlier, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux reimagined this majestic expanse as nature at its most sublime, at once mysterious, romantic, and enchanting for its ability to erase the outside world. Here the relentless grind of rubber meets road disappears and in its place, life returns to a more leisurely pace.

After graduating high school, Shabazz enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving three years before returning home during the summer of 1980. Now living in East Flatbush, he was back on the block only to discover how much had changed. “I started to get word that a lot of young men were dying at the hands of other young men,” Shabazz says. “I knew their older brothers and sisters, so it was very personal for me. I needed to find out what was going on. I wanted to engage people and found out that photography drew them in because it made them feel special. Kids took pride in the way they dressed. They had fresh cuts, nice gear, and the girls were the same way. They went to school dressed to impress.

When the school year started in 1980, Shabazz began making trips to local high schools to chop it up with the kids. In the mornings, he’d visit Samuel J. Tilden and in the afternoons, he would head over to Erasmus, carrying his camera and curated photo albums. “They would brief me on what was happening,” Shabazz says. “I was concerned for their future and trying to give them guidance. Then I would photograph them as evidence of the conversation. I let them know these images would mean something one day, so put your best at it and I had to get it right the first time because I didn’t have a lot of film. I was very intentional about everything that I did. I’d make prints and give them one at no cost, and that helped to build a lot of relationships.”

Focused and disciplined, Shabazz arose every morning at six and headed over to Prospect Park for his daily run along the horse trail. Away from it all, what was hiding in plain sight made itself known: the park was the perfect studio for his emerging photography practice. Here, he could freely experiment with portraiture, street photography, landscapes, and documentary work. The camera guided him like a compass, taking Shabazz on a spiritual journey that would span his 20-year career as a police officer working in the New York City Department of Correction.

“It is quiet and beautiful, and everyone here seems like they are searching for inner peace. It was a certain frequency that I just loved and that became my base,” he says. “When I became a Correction Officer, I needed to decompress from the violence I was witnessing, and it became an oasis where I could heal myself. I took in everything: the sunrises and sunsets, the sound of the birds, the diversity of the people. One of the first things that directed me to social documentary photography were the Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees who lived in the area and patronized the park. I realized I needed to understand why we met on this path of life. I started to recognize it as a journey, and the park was the starting point.”

Among those Shabazz encountered on the path was Richard E. Green, a Vietnam veteran, photographer, and community organizer who founded the nonprofit Crown Heights Youth Collective in 1977 and contributed an essay to the book titled “Drummer’s Grove” in celebration of this fabled Sunday gathering of percussionists in the park. Shabazz first met Green during one evening in the park during the Fall of 1980. “I went to see the sunset, and ahead of me was an individual my height with an Army field jacket on. I knew immediately he was in Vietnam, and I wanted to know more about the war and those who served. Richard was the big brother I never had,” he says.

Every photograph in Prospect Park is layered in history of people and place, of Shabazz’s unwavering commitment to trusting the process. For many Vietnam vets, the drums became a form of therapy to manage post traumatic stress; for Shabazz, the camera did the same while working as a CO for 20 years. He would retire in 2003, two years after his groundbreaking debut, Back in the Days, was published, but the recovery process would continue for years. Prospect Park was equal parts sanctuary and studio, the camera an instrument with which he could compose tender reveries of humanity in its most idyllic state, living together in nature with dignity and grace.

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A century later, photography became the provenance of picture magazines like Life and Look, its pages filled with big, splashy ads and cinematic photo documentary reportage that had all the hallmarks of Hollywood copaganda. At the same time, photography upended the Western myth of genius embedded in rarity and exclusion, leaving it largely excluded from the echelons of the art world until the 1980s. But in the hands of artists and activists who understood that the camera, like the pen, could be a tool of  liberation, photography played a revolutionary role in 20th century life. For Black America, the photograph was more than artifact or work of art; it was evidence, bearing witness and speaking truth to power in a nation built on slavery, genocide, and land theft. In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley did just this when she released  the pictures of her son Emmett Till after he was lynched, her courageous act helping to  ignite the Civil Rights Movement.  

That same year, photographer Roy DeCarava and poet Langston Hughes published  The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a pocket-size paperback pairing black and white vignettes  of Harlem alongside an intimate tale of daily life that blurred the lines between fact,  fiction, myth, and memory. The book stood at the vanguard of the Black Arts Movement  (BAM), which first took root alongside the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and would become the blueprint for collective practice and community action. Like the Harlem Renaissance, which signaled the arrival of Black America on the global stage, BAM heralded a new vision of Black life across art, music, literature, theater, dance, film, video, and public space that stood in solidarity with independence movements across the African diaspora.  

Now the new exhibition, Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, at the National Gallery of Art crafts a panoramic look at visionaries like Gordon  Parks, for whom the camera was their choice of weapon. Curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, the exhibition showcases work by over 100 artists including Kwame Brathwaite, the mastermind behind the “Black Is Beautiful” movement in beauty and fashion; Black Panthers graphic designer Emory Douglas, and James Van Der Zee, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance whose 1982 portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat has become a modern masterpiece. 


At a time when the Trump White House calls for a “comprehensive review” of the  Smithsonian Institution’s eight museums in advance of the country’s 250th anniversary,  the state sanctioned history of Black America has come under fire once again. The  exhibition catalogue stands as an archive against erasure, spotlighting artists whose  contributions have gone overlooked for far too long. Many have since passed, and  those who remain are now elders whose work forms the blueprint of iconic legacies  hiding in plain sight.  

Amid the wealth of layered histories, a pattern emerged between artists of different  nations, generations, and cultural backgrounds. It is evident in the work of the  photographers of Kamoinge Workshop, which has gone on to become the longest  running photography collective. Founded in 1963, the group took its name (Kamoinge – “working together”) from the Kikuyu people who liberated Kenya from the British that  very year. In a nation that touts rugged individualism as a totem of success, Kamoinge  understood the power of collectivism was the high tide that lifts all ships. “Shunning the  stereotypical imagery found in the mainstream press, Kamoinge members sought to  portray Black life in its fullness and complexity, often choosing themes at their weekly  meetings for collaborative exploration,” Cheryl Finley writes in the catalogue. 

Roy DeCarava became the first director of Kamoinge, instilling a vision of photography  as fine art and creating a space where knowledge, wisdom, and understanding could  flourish among established and emerging photographers. Taken together they form a  constellation of spirit in the material world. From Ming Smith’s ethereal portrait of Sun  Ra dissolving into the ether to Al Fennar’s portrait of three men smoking cigarettes while  cruising the streets of Greenwich Village, their work illuminates new ways of seeing the world as resonant then as they are now. Kamoinge member Anthony Barboza went on to become one of its most influential commercial photographers, his 1970s portrait of Pat Evans in profile rocking a baldie redefining beauty, glamour, and power with grace.

These works, crafted from need and desire rather than status and wealth, have become  the foundation upon which contemporary photography now rests. Photography and the  Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 is the perfect entrée into a repository of soul. 


Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 is now on view until January 11, 2026 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

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In 1987, the British Conservative Party trotted out their election manifesto, introducing a Community Charge (“Poll tax”) wherein citizens were required to pay the state for local government services. It was a desperate play to shift the tax burden onto the poor, and in direct contraction of the party’s 1979 manifesto, which abolished it in an effort to install Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

Photographer Mark McEvoy, then 20 years old, remembers, “Thatcher was re-elected for a third term but everyone I knew couldn’t wait for her to go. The introduction of the Poll tax was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It led to riots and social dissent, which eventually led to Thatcher’s resignation.” It was an ignoble end to the neoliberal regime that joyously signified a new era of optimism emerging across the nation that coincided with the arrival of Generation X.

That same year, McEvoy hit up Notting Hill Carnival, camera in hand, to photograph London’s legendary Black August street spectacular. Originally organized in 1959 by Trinidadian journalist and activist Claudia Jones following the Notting Hill Uprising of the previous year, Notting Hill Carnival slowly evolved into the largest annual celebration of the African diaspora on British soil. As the Windrush Generation made a way for Black immigrants from around the globe, Carnival has become the place they could come together as one.

From the first time McEvoy first heard Bob Marley and the Wailers, he began to follow the scene as it took root in London – one third of what photographer Armet Francis first called “The Black Triangle” of Africa, Jamaica, and the UK. With the explosion of reggae artists chanting down Babylon, the London scene took root and McEvoy began following local bands like Aswad, Steel Pulse, and UB40, as well as sound systems like Jah Shaka, Coxsone, and Channel One. “One of the many perks of growing up in London was the cultural diversity and exposure to incredible music, food, fashion and communities,” he says. “Notting Hill Carnival was an essential part of my late Summer, a weekend of music, dance, drink, smoke and food in late August definitely not to be missed. The celebratory atmosphere, vibrant colours, sounds and smells all lifted my spirit.”

Now McEvoy looks back at the era in the new book, Notting Hill Carnival 1987–1992 (Cafe Royal Books), published in advance of this year’s festivities, August 23-25, 2025. The photographs evoke memories of moving from sound system to sound system with a rum punch in hand, dancing to roots reggae, heavy dub, calypso, and soca as the procession of steel pan drummers rang out through the crowds. “I would go to carnival on Saturday and Sunday – the quieter days for processions and families,” McEvoy says. “Monday was my day for letting go and following the sound systems with camera on hand for those unexpected moments. People were open, friendly and accommodating when having their picture taken. They were in party mode, almost oblivious to anything but being moved by the music and good vibes.”

McEvoy came of age in West Hampstead, North London, during the last hurrah of the analogue era, though few knew it yet. Originally a classically trained violinist, he gravitated towards photography. “My father (a keen photographer himself) would give me his Olympus OM-1 loaded up with a roll of b&w film and set me free. I wandered the streets taking photos, exchanging smiles with the locals, embracing the unknown with a curious spirit. At the age of 19, with 70 rolls of film in my rucksack I travelled to India for three months. I was hooked and never looked back. The camera was a stepping-stone into new experiences and worlds that gave meaning and purpose to my life.”

Drawing inspiration from photographers including Don McCullin, William Klein. Weegee, and Diane Arbus, McEvoy adopted a documentary approach that is at once intuitive and visceral. “I’ve always been interested in capturing what lies below the surface, unnoticed and often ignored,” he says. “One of the many perks of growing up in London was the cultural diversity and exposure to incredible music, food, fashion and communities. The city was rough around the edges but seemed to have so much more character and charm – before gentrification and corporate takeover.”

McEvoy’s luminous photographs of Notting Hill Carnival at the turn of the 1990s recall a city of hope for a world free from the relentless Sturm und Drag of Thatcher’s regime. “I feel lucky to have grown up when I did,” McEvoy says. “Subcultures were authentic and fresh. It was as if anything was possible in the world of fashion, visual arts, music and theatre. There was a sense of innocence, contentment with the unknown, and a willingness to discover and let life take its own course. I am still a traditionalist, constantly looking for ways to recapture some of what was lost.”

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Hailing from the Halfway tree part of Molynes Road in Kingston, Jamaica, Walshy Fire (born Leighton Walsh) lived walking distance from the arcade where local legends Jack Sowah, Skunkman, and Cassette Peter set up their booths, hustling dancehall mixtapes. “The moment I left the house, these guys were right here with huge speakers playing the latest tapes,” Walsh says. “They were all competing, trying to get the person to buy their taste over someone else by having the latest and the highest quality.”

Party flyers were stashed inside the tapes, their hand drawn art capturing Walsh’s imagination. At a time when paper was fast and cheap, artists and promoters embraced the DIY ethos of the times, getting the word out by handing out passes and leaving stacks at local shops and hubs. “You had no other distraction, so you’re immersed and the artwork on these cassette tapes was amazing,” he says. “These guys were hand drawing each one. The competition was so lethal to make a great flyer. It was like a movie poster so these guys didn’t want to come out half assed, and the competition for business made everybody step it up. The reason they were getting the most work is because their art was too good to ignore.”

After the family moved to Miami, Walsh came into his own as a natural born entrepreneur, selling the latest dancehall tapes. “I had the best plug,” Walsh says of his brother, legendary Jamaican cricketer Courtney Walsh. “He was the Michael Jordan of cricket and would fly to Miami all the time so I could always tap into him to bring up a box full of cassette tapes of the newest stuff. I saw the opportunity and I’ve always been a hustler. I was outside every night at 14 years old, walking around the flea market and the mall. I used to go to parties and wait until they would be let out. I sold tapes everywhere I could.”

For a time, Walsh kept the flyers, not thinking of why, until his college years when he started traveling to New York and Washington DC during the mid 1990s. “I started to actively go to every Jamaican restaurant and record shops, and take as many flyers as possible,” he says. “I used to visit the bike store on Houston [Street], and collect as many flyers as possible. They weren’t all any particular genre; I just thought it was cool that I was in New York. Then it became a passion, where I started to seek it.” In time Walsh amassed an archive of dancehall history and art, elevating these exquisite slips of ephemera into artifacts that map the culture as it made its way across the globe.

Now Walsh — a Grammy-nominated artist, producer, DJ, MC, and member of Major Lazer and Black Chiney — adds a feather to his cap, as author of Art of Dancehall: Flyer and Poster Designs of Jamaican Dancehall Culture (Rizzoli Universe). Organized by country, the book brings together historic works from Walsh’s collection, along with selections from Lee Major, Muscle, Mark Professor and Stanjah, charting the history of the scene as it took the world by storm.

The Art of Dancehall begins in Jamaica, with handcrafted flyers by Denzil “Sassafrass” Naar, the nation’s original celebrity poster artist, which set the tone, promising epic revelry the likes of which one might encounter in a Hollywood film. And like the music, flyer styles quickly branched out, making their way across the UK, US, Canada, and Japan, and taking root in places like Brooklyn, the unofficial “15th Parish” of Jamaica.

“This dance created musical history,” Lee Major wrote of the 1993 flyer featuring his sound system, Earth Ruler, against reigning champion Addies. He continued, “Biltmore Ballroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was the most iconic spot for dances in New York City. It was definitely the proving ground—you had to prove yourself there, you had to make it or break it there. Earth Ruler were the up and coming sound—they were killing everything, and there was only one more left to kill and it was the big dog [Addies]. This felt like the biggest dance New York ever saw. Earth Ruler changed things musically at that point.”

Earth Ruler also brought Brooklyn style into the scene, rocking Tommy Hilfiger and Timberlands just as the Hip Hop-dancehall fusion started to hit with artists like Heavy D, Doug E. Fresh, Supercat, Mad Lion, and Smif-N-Wessun. “When I went to New York, and started pursuing [my flyer collection], I started to realize that something there was way bigger than me,” Walsh says. “You have Earth Ruler – Lee Major – he was actually clashing, and winning and losing, this was his life.”

For Walsh, The Art of Dancehall is a love letter to the world that made him.“Not only did you have to know where to go, you had to say to yourself, am I willing to put myself in danger – is it that important, that good?” Walsh remembers. “Man, the danger can’t be left out. That’s what makes us, older people, so proud of these moments. Everything was sketchy, so you came out with these war stories.”

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Hailing from Jamaica, photographer Dennis Morris arrived in London at the age of 5 as part of the Windrush Generation that rebuilt the UK after World War II. The family settled in the city’s East End at a time when local businesses openly posted signs boasting: “No dogs, no Blacks, no Irish.” Searching for belonging, Morris joined the boys choir at St. Mark’s Church in Dalton, his love of music serendipitously introducing him to photography. “My mentor was a man called Donald Patterson, who was an inventor and manufacturer of photographic equipment, and created a photographic club for the choir boys,” Morris remembers. “I was nine, and from that age, I was smitten. I was a very shy kid but when I had the camera in my hand, I felt like nobody could touch me.”

Patterson impressed upon Morris the importance of documentation and reportage, of being in community with the people he photographed. A natural born entrepreneur, he understood photographs were both artifacts and currency from a young age. He got his start hustling photographs at birthday parties and christenings, earning the moniker “Mad Dennis” as he chronicled life in his neighborhood with the same passion as his heroes, Gordon Parks, Don McCullin, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. At age 11, Morris got his big break when he photographed a local demonstration by the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization). Seizing the moment, the self-starter brought the film to United Press International (UPI), who licensed the photograph to the Daily Mirror, who published it on the front page the very next day.

Some say luck is when preparation meets opportunity, overlooking the vital role that instinct plays in orchestrating destiny. For Morris, seeing is a knowing that exists beyond words, a slice of time that lives on long after the moment has passed. Heeding the call, he forged a singular path at a time when photography could hardly be considered a career, let alone fine art. Now, half a century later, he looks back in Dennis Morris: Music + Life, a new exhibition and monograph that traces a tree of life, root to flower.

Organized chronologically we watch “Mad Dennis” map a tapestry that begins at home, in the basement parties where reggae was played, making its way on to the streets as sound system culture rocked the East End. Then he photographed the burgeoning Sikh community in Southall and the radicals at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, crafting an intimate portrait of working class London at the end of empire. In 1973, Morris read that Bob Marley was headed for London on “Catch a Fire,” his first tour. “Something told me that I had to be there that first gig so come that day, I picked up my bag as if I was going to school, and left, went to the club at like 10 o’clock in the morning,” says Morris, who waited until Marley arrived mid-afternoon. “I walked up to him and said, ‘Can I take your picture?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, mon, come in.’ I went inside the club. They were doing soundcheck, and when they had breaks, Bob would talk to me. He was asking me what it was like to be a young Black kid in England, and I was asking him about Jamaica. And something just sparked between us.”

From the flame of mutual recognition, a moment of clarity emerged. Marley invited Morris to come on tour as official photographer. The next day, Morris packed his bags as if he was going to school to play sports, headed straight to the hotel, and jumped into the back of the tour van. Marley turned around, looked back and asked, “Are you ready?” Indeed he was, camera at the ready, the friendly exchange becoming one of his most iconic photos. “Bob was one of the first reggae musicians who really understood the power of imagery. I think he realized that I was able to capture what he was trying to project as a musician about his songs, about himself, about his art in those images I took,” Morris says. “If I was an actor, you would call me a method actor, because every musician I’ve worked with, I’ve always tried to get into their mind and into their world to create an image that portrays a song or the album in that way.”

The “Catch a Fire” tour traveled to 19 clubs and universities between April 27–May 29, and though successful, the bleak English weather and cuisine didn’t sit well with the Jamaican nationals. First week in, Marley pulled back the window curtain to find the landscape had been blanketed with something strange. “Wha’dat? he asked. Morris told him it was snow. The word, to say nothing of the very concept, was entirely brand new. Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer took it as a sign from Jah to pack it up and go home. The tour would collapse soon thereafter.

Back in London, Mad Dennis was on his game. “It’s that drive, that same obsession as a kid in America who wants to be a football player and always had the ball next to him— to me that was the camera,” Morris says. “I turned my bedroom into a darkroom. I blocked out the window, got a shelf built, I could do printing and stuff like that. I was basically sleeping in a darkroom, inhaling chemical fumes.”

Embodying the spirit of DIY that defined the 70s, Morris followed his destiny, returning to the land of his birth to chronicle the island’s flourishing reggae scene. “I went back to Jamaica because of Bob,” Morris says. “When I first met him, he said, ‘Do you realize, Dennis, that you are an exotic plant that’s been uprooted and then replanted in a concrete soil? Do you realize how strong you have to be to survive to grow?’ When I went back to Jamaica and saw the beautiful soil I came from, the way that people were struggling to make a living, and also the vibrancy, energy, and positiveness they had about the music, about being Jamaican and, being Black, I saw where I came from and was then able to put all the pieces together.”

Morris returned to England with renewed heart, obliterating any obstacles placed before him. His singular devotion was rooted in knowledge of self. “I never saw myself as a photographer, I saw myself as an artist whose tool is a camera,” Morris says. And so he would go on to reshape the very nexus of radical culture as it unfolded, documenting the Sex Pistols, bridge the punk and reggae scenes, and signaling the arrival of New Romanticism with his collaboration with Public Image Limited. “What a lot of people forget is that the camera is just a box,” he continues. “The most important part of the camera is the lens, but the more important part is what we call ‘the third eye.’ It’s not what you see with your two eyes, but it’s the inner eye that makes a great photograph.”

Dennis Morris: Music + Life is on view June 27–September 21, 2025 at The Photographers Gallery, London, UK

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