AMIRI BARAKA. (LEROI JONES)

Gelatin silver print. 14 x 14 in. image on 16 x 20 in. sheet. Light wear. Signed by Barboza and titled "Imamu Baraka – poet – 76" by the photographer.

This is a splendid Anthony Barboza portrait of Amiri Baraka. Baraka's illustrious and controversial 50-year career, in which he first achieved fame as Leroi Jones, encompassed poetry, drama, fiction, criticism, and activism.

Critic Arnold Rampersad counted Baraka with Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison "as one of the eight figures … who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture."

Anthony Barboza (b. 1944) is perhaps most famous for his portraits of musicians, dancers, and writers and for his photojournalist, fashion, and editorial spreads in countless magazines. His work has been exhibited in many solo and group shows and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Cornell University, the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Center – NYPL, and the National Portrait Gallery, among others.

Barboza's photographs are the subject of a major new monograph, Eyes Dreaming: Photography by Anthony Barboza (Getty Museum).

This is a splendid portrait linking two of the great African American artists of the second half of the twentieth century.

"When I do a portrait, I'm doing a photograph of how that person feels to me; how I feel about the person, not how they look. I find that in order for the portraits to work, they have to make a mental connection as well as an emotional one. When they do that, I know I have it"—Anthony Barboza