“Jesus, I had a drink with Miles Davis!”

My name is LeRoy Downs. I am a jazz radio broadcaster, journalist, festival host, and curator of live jazz performances here in Los Angeles and around the globe.

Programming music on the radio is an art, and I use the sonic sensibilities of my playlists to reflect on our time now, and visions of life before: a glimpse into culture, community, and the world around us.

The photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop lived and were immersed in the culture during the Harlem Renaissance, when their visual sensibilities spoke through their images. Jazz and photography were a voice to express the sentiments of life, and of people of color. Musical improvisation inspired images captured by Shawn Walker and other photographers in the Kamoinge Workshop inspired images captured by Mr. Shawn Walker and the Kamoinge Workshop, where truth, community, culture, and pride were immortalized. Jazz continues to be etched into souls, lives and the music of life, captured through their images.

LeRoy Downs: Life is a series of moments. Photographs capture the real undisputed truth of those moments in time. How vast is the difference between that truth and an admirer’s interpretation, when it comes to photography?

Shawn Walker: It’s the truth for that moment, for that fraction of time. I consider photography alchemy; it’s magic. I’ve been in this field for 55 years, and I realize that we’re like time walkers; we go into time, take a piece of it out, stick it in our pockets, and 20 years later we can pull that decisive moment out and show it to someone.

LD: What was the impetus that led a group of young men and women in the 60s to come together artistically to form the photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop?

SW: We were a group of brothers living in the Black community. The majority of us lived in Harlem. There were two groups that got together. We all discussed what we wanted and how we wanted to express ourselves to the world at large. The core members decided to become the Kamoinge Workshop.

“Kamoinge” is a Kikuyu word that means “a group of people working together.” We want to show that we believe in our Black aesthetic, we believe in the African continent, we believe that we’re Africans born in the Americas, and we want to show our association with the continent of Africa. We became a group, and shortly after that, we became a family.

LD: How much of the history of 1963 is present when you frame a scene in your lens?

SW: For me, the late 50s—and the early ‘60s into the ‘80s—was the awakening of the new Harlem Renaissance. So, the things that you’re talking about were happening in the South, but this is a Harlem-based organization.

We were very conscious of these things and also conscious of what was happening in South Africa. We wanted to go out and photograph the Black folks that you don’t see in the average white magazine, or in newspapers.

One of the brothers knew somebody who worked for this program called Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU-ACT) with a group called Youth in Action. And they were centered on 125th Street in Harlem. I went upstairs to get a job, and I said, “I know a little bit about photography, and I’m willing to learn.” I went upstairs, and this was the first time I was clear about what I had learned from Kamoinge in the very short time that I was there, because I knew more than anybody upstairs.

LD: The click of the shutter seals that moment in time. How easy is it to go back and describe those feelings and inspirations?

SW: Okay, there’s a term in photography called “the decisive moment.” People who I most admire did this type of photography, and one was Roy DeCarava. He was a mentor of mine and one of the mentors of the Kamoinge Workshop. One of the things he said when he looked at our work was, “You guys are trying to be artists!” I’ve been influenced by him, my uncle who was a photographer, and another photographer called Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The decisive moment is when you catch somebody when they’re totally unaware of you in their space—when they’re totally themselves, or functioning in the space around them, the situation around them—and capturing the high point of that moment. It was about trying to see the pureness in people, the kind of innocence in us that people could relate to.

LD: One thing that I see when I view the photography is the very serious nature of our demeanor as Black people.

SW: It was of a serious nature, but there is a photographer I would assume, hopefully, most people know about named James Van Der Zee, who did pictures from the turn of the century. He was still taking pictures at 90, and Anthony Barboza (another Kamoinge member) was working with him.

There’s another group of brothers, who are twins, called Marvin and Morgan Smith. They have a book out, and it’s really about the [Harlem] Renaissance period. These guys just recently died, but they had a studio next to the Apollo Theater. This is where they photographed all the Black stars, celebrities, and people who just wanted their picture taken.

And those are the things that my cohort and I drew from. That style: we were stylish people!

I have a series of photographs on Easter Sundays. I just ran the streets in Harlem to take pictures of people coming out of or going into church. That’s what I mean about the second renaissance: instead of dressing in European clothing, there was a whole renaissance move to Black African prints. Jazz was really blooming at this point. I tell people that jazz is the background music to my life.

We were all going to clubs and started hanging out on 52nd Street where the jazz music was: Birdland, Minton’s Playhouse, Baby Grand, Smalls Paradise, Slugs’, and others. The two things at our meetings were jazz and food. The rest was us talking about our work.

We would criticize each other’s work. We traveled together, went to exhibitions, museums, films together, and we would talk about these things in our workshops. I had seen [jazz trumpeteer] Lee Morgan at 18 years old. We understood improvisation, and we were trying to do that with our cameras: capture those decisive moments, that improvisation, and have it intelligently understood, admired, and appreciated.

LD: As a Black man and photographer in Harlem for the last five decades, how has the vision through your lens changed?

SW: When I got up to Harlem—maybe the late 70s, early 80s—things had changed. There was a whole new immigrant influx that was happening, and it wasn’t easy to walk around the community taking pictures of strangers. So, I changed my approach. I decided to take a small video camera, and now I shoot music!

In Harlem, there’s a lot of free concerts, particularly outdoor concerts. There was Jazzmobile and Dancemobile, flatbed trucks that rode through different communities spreading the music around.

I asked myself, “Am I a journalist, a photojournalist, am I a documentarian?” And I realized that I consider myself a cultural anthropologist!

I wanted to do a visual history of jazz, still continuing to do work that talks about our genius. I want to be recognized as an African American photographer, no matter what I do. My work is founded on African culture.