Harlem photographer Shawn Walker's collection of photos dating back to 1963 will be made public in the Library of Congress, the library said on Wednesday. They acquired Walker's collection of some 100,000 photos, negatives and transparencies as well as 2,500 items from the photographer collective Kamoinge Workshop that Walker donated to the library.
The series of images from Walker documents life in Harlem from 1963 to today—from street life and neighborhood celebrations to scenes depicting policing issues and poverty. Walker also photographed Jesse Jackson, David Dinkins, Eli Muhammad, Maya Angelou, among other iconic figures a part of Black history in the U.S. The collection is the first comprehensive archive of an African American photographer in the library, according to the institution.
"A lifetime resident of Harlem, I have tried to document the world around me, particularly the African American community, especially in Harlem, from an honest perspective so that our history is not lost," Walker said in a press release. He added, "I am pleased that both my own photographic artwork and also some of the materials I have collected in my role as a cultural anthropologist ... [have] found a home in such a prestigious institution and can finally be shared with the world."
Walker grew up in Harlem and learned photography from his uncle. He was a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective created in 1963 of African American photographers that aimed to reframe how black communities were photographed. "We wanted to show a picture that did not emphasize the negativity that the white photographers clung to when shooting in our community," Walker told Timeline in a 2018 feature. "We could decide what images went into print."
Kamoinge, which means "a group of people acting and working together" in Gikuyu, a language spoken in Kenya, had been working to archive the collective's decades-long history since at least 2011.
"We are very pleased to celebrate the addition of these two important collections to the Library's extensive representation of African American life in the United States, from photography's earliest formats to the present day," the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a statement. The Shawn Walker Photography Archive will join the library's prints and photographs collection. Some of the prints will be digitized, though the Library of Congress did not specify how many.
