Until
recently, histories of photography would have ignored Louis H. Draper — not
because of the quality of his photographs, but because of the color of his
skin. With the exception of Gordon Parks, African-Americans were mostly glossed
over or excluded altogether.
But
over the last 25 years, a new generation of historians and curators have worked
to pluck from obscurity photographers who were marginalized because of color,
gender, geography or class. Those efforts were often thwarted by the loss of
photographers’ papers and prints. Luckily, Mr. Draper had preserved an archive,
and in recent years, his work has risen in visibility and esteem. Candela Books + Gallery, in Richmond, Va., will host a major career retrospective in early
2014. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has added several of his prints to
its permanent collection, some of which will be part of the exhibition “Signs
of Protest: Photographs From the Civil Rights Era,” which opens next spring.
Members
of Kamoinge, a community of like-minded black
photographers that Mr. Draper helped to create in the early 1960s, have long
appreciated his lyrical work.
“Lou
Draper’s photographs of blacks in the streets of Harlem showed their dignity,
grace and sense of pride,” Shawn Walker, a member of Kamoinge, told Ten 8
magazine in 1987. “His photographs were printed so well, they were
three-dimensional. I’d never seen such beautiful photographs of ordinary black
people.”
Mr.
Draper was born in 1935 just beyond the city limits of Richmond, in a house
that his sister, Nell Draper-Winston, still calls home. The family, she said,
was “poor in money, but rich in everything else.” Their father was an amateur
photographer, but in high school, Mr. Draper’s passion was baseball.
Ms.
Draper-Winston said that the family valued education, and that college was the
unquestioned destination for her and her brother. Mr. Draper began to dabble in
photography while attending the then-segregated Virginia State College (now,
University) in Petersburg.
It
was there, his sister said, that “the bug hit him.”
In a
1998 interview for an in-house publication at Mercer County Community College
in New Jersey, where he taught for 20 years, he drolly attributed his new
enthusiasm for photography to “divine intervention.” One day, he had found the
catalog for the photography exhibition “Family of Man,” which opened at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1955, on the bed in his dormitory room.
As he
leafed through its pages, he was “just mesmerized.”
“That
book really gave me a direction,” he said. The faces that populated the gritty
black-and-white images by some of the world’s leading photographers especially
captivated him.
Mr.
Draper never learned who had placed the catalog on his bed. He called it “a
gift from God.”
By
1957, he said in the 1998 interview, he was overcome by “a mad desire to study
photography.” Like many young people before and since, he set his sights on New
York City, the capital of American photography. There, he found the instruction
and mentoring that he craved from the photographers Roy DeCarava, Harold
Feinstein and W. Eugene Smith (each of whom was included in “Family of Man”)
and from the poet Langston Hughes.
“I
knew he was passionate about his work,” his sister said. “You could see it. His
real joy came from capturing the character of everyday people.”
By
the time Mr. Draper died in 2002, he had become a respected member of the
photographic community in New York but was little known beyond it, despite
numerous exhibitions, publications and awards. In his hometown, his work was
virtually unknown.
The
recent reappraisal of his photography would not have been possible without the
efforts of his sister, Ms. Draper-Winston, who preserved his archive, and the
friends who organized it. The archive allows writers and curators to assess Mr.
Draper’s 45-year career as a whole, perhaps for the first time.
Margaret
O’Reilly, a curator at the New Jersey State Museum, who is editing a book of Mr.
Draper’s photography, described him as a significant artist who “captured the
cultural zeitgeist of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, particularly in New York.”….. lens.blogs.nytimes
All
images © Louis Draper/Steven Kasher
Gallery/The Louis H. Draper Preservation Trust
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