Beuford Smith, Photographer Who Chronicled Black Life, Dies at 89

Beuford Smith, a socially conscious photographer who created empathetic, abstract and sometimes shadow-filled images of life in Black communities in New York City, including jazz musicians at work and the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on June 7 in Brooklyn. He was 89.

His wife, Evelyn Dickerson-Smith, said he died of cancer in a nursing home.

Mr. Smith came of age in the early 1960s, when Black photographers had scarce opportunities to be hired by mainstream publications. He joined a collective of talented Black photographers in Harlem called the Kamoinge Workshop, a networking group that offered encouragement to its members, helped nurture their skills and told stories about Black people through their photos. Kamoinge (pronounced KUH-mon-gay) means “people working together” in Kikuyu, a Kenyan language.

He was also a founding editor of “The Black Photographers Annual,” a four-volume anthology that was published irregularly between 1973 and 1980 as a showcase for Black photographers.

“We had abstract, glamour, civil rights, everything in it,” Mr. Smith told The New York Times’s Lens blog in 2017. “We did not want to ghettoize, that Black photographers just photographed jazz musicians or poverty scenes.”

On April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. King was killed in Memphis, Mr. Smith brought his camera to Harlem. One photo he took that day was of a Black man enveloped in darkness, weeping as a white delivery man was being beaten on 125th Street. In an interview with the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2022, Mr. Smith said that the anguished man in Harlem was saying, “Please don’t attack him, leave him alone.”