“The Whitney presents Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, a groundbreaking exhibition featuring over 150 photographs by fourteen early members of the Kamoinge Workshop, nine of whom are living and working today. In 1963 a group of Black photographers based in New York came together in the spirit of friendship and exchange and chose the name Kamoinge—meaning ‘a group of people acting together’ in Gikuyu, the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya—to reflect the essential ideal of the collective. Focusing on the first two decades of the collective (1963-1983), Working Together celebrates the Kamoinge Workshop’s important place in the history of photography and foregrounds the collective’s deep commitment to photography’s power and status as an independent art form.” — Whitney Museum of American Art

“It’s a privilege to present this exhibition in New York where the collective was founded, and where much of the artists’ influential, early work was created,” said Carrie Springer, assistant curator. “Each artist had his or her own sensibility and independent career, but they shared a commitment to photography as an art form, and the exhibition demonstrates their insightful and inventive portrayal of the communities they saw and participated in. As Louis Draper said in an introductory statement to Kamoinge Workshop Portfolio No. 1, the Kamoinge artists’ ‘creative objectives reflect a concern for truth about the world, about the society and about themselves.’ The photographs of these artists are as significant to the history of photography as they are to the current moment.”

The exhibition is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) and was curated by Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, associate curator of modern and contemporary art. The installation at the Whitney is overseen by Carrie Springer, assistant curator, with Mia Matthias, curatorial assistant.

Images courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.