The Kamoinge Workshop: Shooting with your Heart

By Charles McGuigan 05.2020

Justice can be poetic.  At times, ironically fitting in the extreme.

Consider that land at the corner of Grove Avenue and North Arthur Ashe Boulevard. It was once the property of a slave-owning banker. Later, part of it was occupied by the R. E. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers’ Home, and another portion by the Home for Confederate Women.

Ultimately, the site became home to one of the Commonwealth’s greatest achievements—the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, an institution whose very contents propel society forward. For art conquers stupidity and inhumanity and ignorance every time.

Last June, the broad avenue bordering the east side of the VMFA was formally renamed Arthur Ashe Boulevard.  It was a day for the ages as hundreds spilled onto the broad boulevard that now bears the name of one of Richmond's most beloved native sons—a true hero, who remains the only person to have ever won both the US Amateur and the US Open championships in the same year. He was more than that, though. Arthur was a teacher, a social activist, and a humanitarian. He was a major force in pressuring South Africa to end its despicable policy of apartheid, and a worthy recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Then, this past December, a thirty-foot tall bronze sculpture by Kehinde Wiley called Rumors of War was unveiled in front the VMFA with a commanding view of Arthur Ashe Boulevard. This iconic sculpture features a young, contemporary African American man astride a massive horse. It was inspired by Kehinde's encounter with the J.E.B. Stuart monument while he was in Richmond during an exhibit of his work at the VMFA three years ago.    

“There is something moving in the culture,” Wiley said at the unveiling. “There’s something changing in these winds. I’m tired of the destruction. I’m tired of the strife. I think we can do better.”

Which is pretty much what a group of African American photographers in Harlem were thinking about almost sixty years ago. They called themselves the Kamoinge Workshop. Kamoinge is a word borrowed from the Gikuyu language spoken by the Kikuyu people of central Kenya. Roughly translated, it means a group of people working together for a common cause.

On February 1, Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop opened at the VMFA (the exhibit runs through June 24). Organized by the museum’s staff, this singular exhibition chronicles the first twenty years of the Kamoinge Workshop. They wanted to tell the real story of African Americans, not the stereotypical tale related by mainstream media and white photographers. 

At the media opening a few days before, Alex Nyerges, director of the VMFA, took to the podium in a great marble hall. Among those in attendance were several of the artists from the Kamoinge Workshop.

“The exhibition is stunning with a hundred and eighty works of art,” Alex said. “And when you look at it in comparison to the rest of the spectrum of twentieth century and twenty-first century American photography and art, it not only holds its own, but it goes on to its own new level.”

He later introduced the curator of the show---Sarah Eckhardt.

Sarah recalled when she first saw some of the works of Louis Draper, one of the founding members of Kamoinge who was born in Henrico County, and attended the Virginia Randolph School and Virginia State University. Louis’s sister, Nell Draper Winston, showed her brother’s artwork to Sarah. “And I was amazed,” Sarah said. “I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t had wider recognition.”

Shortly after Sarah concluded her remarks, I met up with Adger Cowans, one of the founders of the Kamoinge Workshop.

“We were tired of the images that they were showing of black people at the time,” Adger told me. “Big red lips in a pot in Africa being cooked alive. Negative images of black people. Drug addicted black people. We just got tired of that stuff.  Because we would not have America without black people. We decided to take a positive point of view on all this.”

As with many other art photographers, Adger has always preferred 35 millimeter cameras.  “I wanted to capture those moments in life that were fleeting, and I felt I had to have a 35 millimeter because it was so quick,” he said. ”You’re shooting in the street. It’s quick. If something is fleeting, you have only one chance to get it. You didn’t use a four-by-five and put it on a tripod and say, ‘Could you do that again?’ It’s not going to happen.”

Like other members of the Workshop, Adger was both learner and teacher. He recommended that novice practitioners of the art, study visual art in its many manifestations.  “I told the guys, ‘Look you’ve got to go to the museums and look at the paintings of the masters to understand composition’” Adger said. “You can use that also in taking a picture.” 

He also imparted something he knew that was almost impalpable about the art of photography. “I would tell them that you take pictures with your heart, and not with your eyes,” he told me. “If human feeling or emotion wasn’t there, it didn’t work. Just to have a beautifully composed picture, that’s nice, but you had to have the emotions.”

A virtual tour of this VMFA exhibition is available at https://www.vmfa.museum/collections/stories/louis-draper-and-kamoinge/