Barboza, Anthony
1944-present · Contribution: 1963-present
Built a five-decade commercial and fine-art photography career after joining the Kamoinge Workshop in 1963 as its youngest member, later serving as the collective’s president from 2005 to 2016 and co-editing its landmark 2015 history, Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Barboza moved to New York from New Bedford, Massachusetts, at nineteen and was introduced to the Kamoinge Workshop by fellow photographer Adger Cowans, also profiled in this collection, calling the collective’s weekly critiques “my college” even though he arrived without a camera or a single photograph. After three years photographing for the Navy and the Jacksonville newspaper The Gosport, he returned to New York and built a prolific commercial career shooting Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, and countless other cultural figures for Essence, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, and The New York Times, while his 1978 inclusion (alongside Roy DeCarava) in the Museum of Modern Art’s Mirrors and Windows exhibition made him one of only two Black photographers featured. His 1980 book Black Borders, produced with a National Endowment for the Arts grant, gathered portraits of James Baldwin, Romare Bearden, and Gordon Parks, and as Kamoinge’s president for over a decade he helped steer the group—now billed as the oldest continuously operating nonprofit photography organization in the country—through renewed institutional recognition, including major retrospectives at the National Gallery of Art in 2025.
Life & background
Born May 10, 1944, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to a family of Cape Verdean descent, Barboza graduated from New Bedford High School in 1963 and moved immediately to New York to study photography, joining the Kamoinge Workshop that same year. He was drafted into the Navy in 1965, opened a commercial studio in New York in 1969 after his discharge, and has continued working as a photographer, writer, and Kamoinge leader for more than sixty years; he lives in Westbury, New York, with his wife, actress Laura Carrington, and their children.
Sources
- The HistoryMakers; National Gallery of Art; New Bedford Light
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