Uniting around the Civil Rights Movement, writers, musicians, and visual artists explored how their work could celebrate Black culture and promote dignity, hope, and freedom. “Photography and the Black Arts Movement,” currently on view at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, explores the role photography played in fostering Black empowerment and propelling social change in the Black Arts Movement.
Photography played critical roles in both the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements. Artists used photographs as artistic expression, an organizing tool, and a means of building community. It was used to document the hatred and racism faced by African Americans around the country. It was used as a form of self-representation through portraits and self-portraits. Photographs were also incorporated into other art mediums that allowed the artists who created them to express the stories of African American community, family, and life.
“‘Photography and the Black Arts Movement’ brings together works by more than one hundred photographers, painters, graphic designers, and multimedia artists who used photographic images in their struggles against inequality,” said Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The works in this exhibition show how a wide range of artists and activists tapped the power of photography to strengthen respect for Black community and culture. Amid the turbulence of the mid-20th century, they found powerful ways of using photography to support and advance social justice.”
The exhibition is in eight sections, bringing together more than 150 artworks in a range of mediums, including video art, paintings, collages, contact sheets, newsletters, and magazine spreads. Highlights include paintings by artists including Frank Bowling, David Driskell, Ademola Olugebefola, and Raymond Saunders; photographic portraits by Kwame Brathwaite, Mikki Ferrill, Barkley Hendricks, and Carla Williams; and artwork by Los Angeles icons including Harry Adams, Charles Gaines, Betye Saar, John Simmons, and Bruce Talamon. Recent Getty Museum acquisitions include works by Alvin Baltrop, Roy DeCarava, Chester Higgins, Senga Nengudi, and Beuford Smith.
“Photographers played a central role in developing and advancing Black art and culture globally. Yet their contributions were rarely examined collectively or with the depth afforded to poets, musicians, or painters,” said Deborah Willis, co-curator of the exhibition, via email. “The seed for the exhibition was a question posed by curator Philip Brookman and myself: What happens when we center photography as an engine for the movement? Photography was not merely documenting events; it was shaping aesthetics, building community, and redefining how Black life was seen.”
The artists in the exhibition were selected to explore the depth and breadth of photography between 1955 and 1985. The works explore themes of self-representation from within the community, the construction of Black beauty, the politics of looking, photography’s activist role, and collective experimentation in alternative spaces.
While many of the photographs in the exhibition are joyous, the galleries also feature scenes of violence that were circulated during the time periods covered to bring attention to racism and its effects.
“Visitors should understand that photography was not peripheral to the movement; it was central. The exhibition situates photography within the civil rights struggle, the rise of Black Power, and the emergence of a distinct Black aesthetic,” Willis said. “Several historical threads are important: the impact of Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation; the rise of SNCC, SCLC, and community-based organizing; the Kamoinge Workshop and collectives that centered Black photographers; and the role of magazines like Ebony and Jet in shaping visual culture.”
In today’s political climate, where Black history is being rewritten and marginalized, the exhibition reminds viewers that visual culture has always been a battleground. Photography has always been used as a way to both shape public opinion and exert pressure on the political system, just as it does now over the actions of ICE agents and it did over the last decade for the Black Lives Matter movement.
“In a time when Black history is contested or rewritten, the images in this exhibition operate as evidence and testimony,” Willis said. “They teach us that self-representation is power; that visibility is political; that aesthetics can carry revolutionary meaning. As Julian Bond stated, photographs told stories ‘for those who could not see themselves.’ That remains true today.”
“Photography and Black Arts Movement” is at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles through June 14, 2026. It will then travel to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson from July 25–November 8, 2026. For more info, visit getty.edu.