Legendary photographer Anthony Barboza - The Washington Post

July 16, 2024

Anthony Barboza isn’t exactly sure what his special talent is, but he knows it has something to do with his effect on people. “I don’t know what goes on when people meet me,” he says. “I’ve had Eartha Kitt want me to meet her daughter. James Baldwin invited me to dinner at his brother’s house. I’ve had to tell other people I’m married. When [painter] Norman Lewis died, he told his wife, ‘Watch over Tony and make sure that he’s all right.’ Why did he do that? I don’t understand it. It’s like they could see something in me that I can’t see because I’m busy looking at them.”

Barboza has had an incredible career in photography, and it has kept pace with an equally incredible period in American history. He didn’t just chronicle that history — he participated in it.

Born and raised in New Bedford, Mass., Barboza moved to New York when he was 19. Right after President John F. Kennedy was shot, he began taking his first steps as a photographer. He was invited to join the legendary Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers who coalesced around Louis Draper and Roy DeCarava. Barboza was the youngest in the group.

“They were my professors, and this was my college,” Barboza once said. He learned not only how to take and develop photographs but also how to look at them. And that meant learning also about music and literature and life, all of which was avidly discussed by the Kamoinge photographers.

War in Vietnam brought an abrupt end to this too-brief chapter. In 1965, he was drafted into the Army. Four years later, he was discharged. But he hadn’t been sent to Vietnam. Instead, stationed in Florida, he became a staff photographer for the Pensacola air station newspaper, and from 1965 to 1968 he took indelible photographs of African American communities in Pensacola and Jacksonville.

Back in New York, Barboza worked as a portrait photographer for Essence, recently established as a lifestyle magazine aimed at African American women. The first to shoot fashion photographs on the streets of Harlem, Barboza had unforgettable encounters with Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Baldwin, Gordon Parks, Romare Bearden, Lewis and Amiri Baraka, among scores of others.

In subsequent, more personal projects, Barboza captured the movement and flow of famous jazz musicians in New York clubs and dancers in the Dance Theatre of Harlem. In between fashion photographs, album covers, movie posters and advertisements that broke down racial barriers, he traveled to Africa several times and took some of the best New York street photographs of the era.

A lifelong meditator, Barboza says he is able, when taking photographs, to put himself into a special receptive state that he calls “eye dreaming.” It happens not only on the street but also in the studio. “I go into this trance — although it’s a normal thing to me, so you can’t tell I’m in a trance. But I believe the photograph finds you, you don’t find it.”

Eye dreaming

Explaining the difference between his “eye dreaming” and the “programmed state of mind required by Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment,’” Barboza describes the latter as “a formula.”

“It means you’re missing everything else as you concentrate on getting the wheels of the bicycle to go around in that perfect spot. I don’t have a formula. I don’t believe in that. For me, it’s more about having a feeling for the person.”

“I usually create lighting on the spot, from what I feel from the person,” and “the first thing I do when I’ve never met a person is, I make them feel relaxed.”

Whatever Barboza’s special sauce is, it has allowed him to make photographs that the critic Hilton Als has characterized as “emotional, clear and spiritually alert” — photographs that remain as resonant and striking today as they seemed to Barboza’s dreaming eye.

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James Baldwin

Barboza got to photograph Baldwin because a man who wanted to be a model said that if Barboza would take photos of him, he would arrange a shoot with the famous writer. Baldwin, Barboza said, “could read people. He could read me, and I could read him.” The shadow behind him represents “his other side,” according to Barboza, who adds that in person, Baldwin wasn’t political. “He took a liking to me so much that he invited me to dinner at his brother’s house in New York. I asked him, how does he write? He said he writes standing up, and he likes to have people downstairs having fun so he can write better.”

Cher, for New York Times Magazine

“She wanted to use her own photographer. The New York Times said, ‘No, we’re sending Barboza.’ She said, ‘Can you send his book?’ They sent it, and she called back and said, ‘There’s nothing but Black people in it.’ They said, ‘Well, we still want to use him.’”

Pat Evans

“The very first ad I ever did was a Viceroy cigarette ad, and I used her. But that was when she had hair. She came to me and said she was going to cut off all her hair. I said, ‘Really? You’re not going to get any work. You shouldn’t do that.’ She went and did it anyway. I photographed her. She became the first baldheaded model in the whole history of fashion photography.”

“When the Astarte [Cosmetics] ad came out, it was an international success. I earned an award from the New York Directors Club for the ad — and Pat Evans became very famous. Film crews came from as far away as Australia and France to interview us. They were interested in this innovative model who had people talking all over the world.”

Pat Evans and Isaac Hayes

“This was 1971. They wanted to put her with Isaac Hayes because he also had a bald head. Everybody was doing it!”

The Bennu (Phoenix, 1968)

“I shot this in the Navy. I had just gotten to New York at the end of 1963. And then I got drafted into the Army in 1965. I was just getting started! I had a little $20 camera made in Hong Kong and was taking pictures in Central Park, and then I get drafted into the Army. I thought: ‘I don’t want to fight in no jungle! I wasn’t put here on this earth for that.’ I knew what my destiny was. So I ran to the Navy when I went back to my hometown, and they said, ‘Oh, we’ll take you.’ They sent me down to boot camp in Pensacola, Florida, where they had a photography school. There was a sidewalk festival, and I put up some photographs and won all these ribbons. So they decided they needed a photographer for the station newspaper. It was wonderful. I had 10 months left, and it was too expensive to send me to Vietnam for 10 months, so they sent me to Jacksonville, and after that I got out of there.

Dizzy Gillespie cover from Black Borders series

I went every night to the clubs and met and photographed jazz musicians for 10 years. In the ’40s and ’50s when people photographed the jazz musicians, they didn’t have the necessary film speed. When I started, I could have that speed. But my thing was to show that there’s a lot of movement in jazz — people don’t stand there stiff. I get a feeling from watching the musicians move as they play. Music is universal, and it vibrates the bones in the body. That’s why people dance. My thing was, it’s all about the movement — the feeling I get when I’m listening to the music. That’s why I incorporated all that [blur]. I wasn’t the first one, but I did it for nine years, so I got a lot of them.

Miles Davis

I never became close to anyone I photographed because I didn’t want to. I was just there to do a job. But Miles Davis picked me out. I was told to photograph him in 1971. I’d never met him before. I asked people what he was like because I heard a lot of stories about how he could be really rough. I heard he let some photographers stand outside his brownstone for I don’t know how many hours. But it just so happened that his hairdresser was his friend and knew me. So I got in right away and spent the whole day in his house doing whatever I wanted, photographing him everywhere.

After that, he called me every day. “Barboza, what you doing?” After that I met his ex-wife, Betty Davis, and photographed her a lot. Later I was sent to his place in Malibu by the New York Times because they figured Barboza is the only one who can get along with Miles. I was doing the shooting, but he wanted to go swimming, and his hair got tangled because he had rubber bands in it. He’d asked me to take out the rubber bands, but I couldn’t — they got stuck in there! Oh gee. So I did that photograph in Malibu. When he passed away, I cried because I was really close to him. I created that background from yarn or string. There’s a gold plate with his birth and death. They put it on the cover of their magazine.

Sam Gilliam

Before photography I wanted to be an artist, but I couldn’t draw. I found out that everything is more about putting in what you’re feeling than anything else. Gilliam was wonderful. I had him sit there. He liked me so much he gave me a little art piece — I don’t know where it is anymore. I was so amazed by all the colors on the floor. He’s holding a rake — you can see the head of it, with white dots in it.

‘Do the Right Thing’

A company in California came up with the idea for me to photograph him. Their concept was to shoot down on the pavement and have that drawing on it. I was up on a boom looking down, and he [Spike Lee] is so little that I had to do a separate shot with a longer lens to make him a little larger.

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Pepsi ad

I must have done about 300 album covers and more than 500 ads through the years. Most of the ads, I didn’t like the concepts. But I did them because they paid me. I did all my own projects from the money I made from those ads. It wasn’t my idea, but I did it. I loved that one.

Aretha Franklin

This was 1971. I’d never met her. This was my first big shoot. I had worked for the back pages of Harper’s Bazaar before, but this was for Essence. Aretha came in. I was very cordial. There were a lot of people there, a hairdresser, a makeup artist and so on. But once I’m shooting, there’s no butting in unless I invite someone to fix her hair or something. They didn’t even use this photo — they wanted her dancing with a model. But I like this one. You should never ask a singer to sing. So I told her, “Close your eyes and make believe I’m going to kiss you.” I wanted to get her in this dream state — the feeling you have when you’re listening to music sometimes, and you close your eyes. She went to the fashion editor later and said: “Who is he? I like him.”

Dance Theatre of Harlem

A German magazine wanted to do a piece on the Dance Theatre of Harlem. I don’t know anything about dance. But I went to rehearsals and performances and tried to capture the motion in a similar way to my jazz photos.

Rappin’

This was about our culture — how we pick up women we’ve never met by waiting outside clubs. It’s the first fashion shoot ever done in Harlem for a magazine. It’s history, in a sense.

Naomi Sims

I photographed a lot of models, but I’ve never seen a model move as gracefully as Naomi Sims. She had a feeling for the clothes. She knew what she was doing. And she was very sweet. Very graceful.

Halle Berry

I had shot her once before, and then just after this shoot she won the Academy Award.

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