Louis Draper
*Louis Draper was born on this date in 1935. He was a Black art photographer. Louis Hansel Draper was born in Richmond, Virginia.
He and his sister Nell attended a private Catholic school near Richmond, the Van deVere Institute, and Virginia Randolph High School in Glen Allen, VA. In 1953, he enrolled in Virginia State College (now University) in Petersburg, VA, where he became a history major. While he was an undergraduate student, Draper's father, who was an amateur photographer, gave him his first camera. After seeing the exhibition catalog for the 1955 show The Family of Man, Draper decided to become an art photographer.
In 1957, he left school without finishing his final semester to move to New York. In New York, Draper studied with Harold Feinstein and W. Eugene Smith. Draper lived in the New York area for almost thirty years. In 1959, Draper created one of his most famous images, Congressional Gathering, a black and white photograph that depicts hanging drapery arranged to resemble Ku Klux Klan hoods. This photograph has been interpreted as referencing the violence committed by the KKK during the civil rights movement, as well as a specific reference to the Massive Resistance movement in Virginia.
In addition to his images of everyday people in urban settings, Draper photographed significant artists, intellectuals, and civil rights leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, John Coltrane, Malcolm X, Miles Davis, and Langston Hughes. Draper's work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among many other museums and public and private collections. In 1963, Draper helped to form the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of African American photographers living in New York who wanted a community of like-minded artists that would provide mutual support and mentorship.
Many of the younger members of the group identified Draper as a key mentor and educator within Kamoinge. Draper served as the group's president and kept an extensive archive of the group's exhibition history, meetings, and other materials. In 1972, Draper published a history of Kamoinge in the Photo Newsletter. In addition to his mentoring of younger Kamoinge Workshop photographers, Draper taught at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey beginning in 1982.
Louis Draper, known for his images of Harlem in the 1960s and featured in several volumes of the publication, The Black Photographers Annual, died on February 18, 2002. Draper Exhibitions: 2020–2022: Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.
