Smith, Beuford
1936-2025 · Contribution: 1963-2020s
Joined the Kamoinge Workshop as an early member in 1965 and later served as its president, co-founded the Black Photographers Annual in 1972, and spent six decades documenting Black community life, jazz musicians, and street scenes in New York City
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Inspired to take up photography after encountering Roy DeCarava’s images in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, also profiled in this collection, Smith became a formative member of the Kamoinge Workshop, the influential Black photographers’ collective founded in New York in 1963, and described the group as the most critical phase of his artistic development. His most acclaimed body of work, capturing the grief and tension in Black communities the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, along with his shadow-drenched images of jazz musicians mid-performance, established him as a major voice in Black documentary photography; his photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum, and were featured in the 2025 National Gallery exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement. He also founded the Cesaire Photo Agency and taught photography for decades at Cooper Union and Hunter College before his death from cancer in 2025.
Life & background
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio (sources differ on whether 1936 or 1941), Smith moved to New York and joined the Kamoinge Workshop as a founding-era member in 1965, later serving as its president. He launched his freelance photography career in 1966, co-founded the Black Photographers Annual in 1972, and continued exhibiting and teaching into his final years, including a 2026 retrospective at New York’s Keith de Lellis Gallery; he died in 2025 after a battle with cancer.
Sources
- African American Registry; Keith de Lellis Gallery; Whitney Museum of American Art
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