Shadows That Speak: Beuford Smith and the Light of African American Life

From the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the blur of John Coltrane, Smith finds light in African American expression.

On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The very next day, Beuford Smith took to the streets of New York with his camera. One image captures a young Black man watching, just out of frame, a young white delivery man being beaten. The man pleads “please don’t attack him, leave him alone.” He is shrouded in darkness; light pierces through only a few points: the bridge of his nose, his teeth, his eyes… like light catching the water’s edge. His head is tilted back, mouth open, caught in a moment of raw, overwhelming emotion, almost in appeal or prayer. Beside him stands a Black police officer, out of focus. The officer’s only glimmer is on his badges; he is reduced to his institutional role as an agent of the establishment, while the weeping man is rendered in his full humanity. The image’s grain is heavy and visible, especially in its darker areas, giving the shadows weight and texture, almost as though the darkness itself is pressing in. The man is weeping for peace.

This is the world Beuford Smith dedicated his life to documenting - African American life in New York, in all its grief and joy. Smith taught himself the art of photography after encountering Roy DeCarava’s work in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book about life in Harlem. It opened his eyes to what photography could do for Black people, and he never looked away.

In 1965, Smith joined Kamoinge Workshop (derived from the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting together”), a collective founded to create a shared space for Black photographers at a time when mainstream outlets were closed to them. As founding member Louis Draper put it, they sought “to nurture each other,” operating as “a forum of peers who would view our work with honesty and understanding.” It was during his early years in Kamoinge that Smith truly came into his own, alongside photographers like Ming Smith and Anthony Barboza.

In 1973, he co-founded the Black Photographers Annual with Joe Crawford, which was published four times between 1973 and 1980, featuring essays by Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and poems by Gordon Parks. Sitting at the intersection of the Black Arts Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, it showcased everyday African American life in all its mundanity, insisting on its own terms of representation at a moment when the mainstream press largely refused to engage with Black perspectives at all.

Jazz photography runs as a second current through Smith’s work. For African American New Yorkers in this era, the music carried enormous weight; many artists were infusing Afrocentrism and political pride into their sound, and the art form had become as much a site of cultural assertion as of performance. One of Smith’s most famous jazz photographs features bassist Paul Chambers and saxophonist John Coltrane, both captured in full motion, their figures almost entirely blurred. Chambers’ suit, body, and bass all bleed into the same dark grey register; he is present as mass and gravity, just like the low frequencies of his instrument. Coltrane, on the other hand, is almost coming apart. The blur fractures and radiates him outward as he disintegrates into the music. The saxophone catches the light as it moves, creating an almost angelic luminescence; it’s the only thing that truly glows in an almost entirely black frame.

Both photographs - the weeping man, the jazz musicians - are predominantly shadow, with light breaking through at specific and meaningful points: in one, a human face; in the other, a musical instrument. Both vessels of human expression.

Despite being a documentary photographer, Smith’s work is not cold or detached. He approached his subjects with love, seeing, through DeCarava, what photography could do for African American life, and dedicating himself to that project. Whether through the Kamoinge spirit of collective nurturing or the pages of the Annual, his practice was always about creating outside the mainstream, on his own terms. Like bebop, his photographs ask something of the viewer, and give back more than they demand.