James "Jimmie" Mannas Jr. (born September 15, 1941) is an African American photographer, film director, cinematographer, and screenwriter. He is one of the fifteen founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop (1963), which evolved from the union of Kamoinge and Group 35, two groups of African American photographers based in New York City.
His black-and-white photography depicts African American New York City street life, avant-garde jazz musicians, dancers, portraits, landscapes, and post-colonial Guyana. T.T. Griffith Archives, a New York-based archivist, preserves a large number of Mannas' photography.
Early life and education Mannas' early life was shaped by his family and the community of Harlem. Born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 15, 1941, Mannas was one of nine children. His family later moved to Harlem, New York, in 1943.
Mannas grew up on 117th Street in Harlem with his friend Shawn Walker. Mannas was introduced to photography by Walker's Uncle Hoover, a photographer who frequently took images around their neighborhood and taught them how to use a camera. When Walker received his first camera, Mannas was inspired to acquire one, too. Based on an agreement with his father, Mannas worked to save money so his father could purchase his first camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye at 11-years-old.
Upon graduating from high school in 1958, Mannas decided to pursue photography and enrolled in the New York Institute of Photography, where he received his degree in 1960. He received a degree in film editing from the School of Visual Arts in 1963. In 1969, Mannas received a certificate from New York University for studies in film and television.
Career
Photography
While Mannas was studying commercial photography in college, he also practiced as a street photographer and worked at the Slide-O-Chrome photo lab processing film. He formed a close bond with his friends Herbert Randall and Albert “Al” Fennar during this time. Louis Draper, a pivotal figure in the group, met Randall in 1958 during a photography class taught by Harold Feinstein. In 1962, Randall introduced Fennar to Draper during a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. This visit, where they saw an exhibition of photography by Robert Frank and Harry Callahan, was a transformative experience that solidified their friendship and led to the beginning of Kamoinge.
Draper, Mannas, Fennar, and Randall began having informal Sunday evening gatherings and started calling themselves Kamoinge. After high school, Walker took a hiatus from photography. However, Mannas encouraged him to attend an upcoming meeting of Black photographers, rekindling his interest in the medium. Concurrently, Draper joined another Harlem-based photography group called Group 35 because every member used 35mm cameras. Group 35 was composed of Ray Francis, the group's founder, along with Draper, Herman Howard, Earl Jones, Calvin Mercer, and Mel Dixon.
The two photography groups officially coalesced to become one in 1963. However, Draper recalls Ray Francis being the first to suggest the groups’ formation, stating “Ray Francis has been the moving force for this gathering…Ray gave the soundest rationale for coming together as a group. He said that we were working in isolation, unaware of one another’s presence. He felt that the nurturing and sharing we could give each other as a group was critical to our growth and development."
Kamoinge Workshop
The Kamoinge Workshop, which was formulated in the early years of the Civil Rights era and came of age in the Black Arts Movement, consisted of fifteen members, including Louis Draper, Herbert Randall, James Mannas, Shawn Walker, Ray Francis, Al Fennar, Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Daniel Dawson, Herbert Robinson, Beuford Smith, Calvin Wilson, and Ming Smith between 1963 and 1972.
The word “Kamoinge,” pronounced “kuh-moyn-gay,” was derived from the Gikuyu language of Kenya and means “a group of people acting together.” At a time when Black people were coming into their political consciousness, the name “Kamoinge” became a name that represented an “emerging African consciousness exploding within” them. “For the young artists, the word signaled their collective ambition and linked them to the global Pan-African movement, devoted to liberation struggles in colonized countries and connecting widely dispersed communities of the Black diaspora.” Collective empowerment came in the form of group critiques, educational workshops, mentorships, along with securing advertising work, producing exhibition opportunities and fostering institutional connections. Since some Kamoinge members weren't formally trained in photography, “the workshop served as an important intellectual and scholarly space.”
The group's ethos was to craft a visual aesthetic that offered representations of Black people as they saw and experienced them, as beautiful and dignified, to reframe narratives around race and photography. “Most Kamoinge photographers fashioned a form of political coverage that differed from mainstream photojournalism: they avoided images of racist clashes and stereotypes of Black poverty, drugs, and violence.” In a statement originally published in the December issue of James Van DerZee Institute's Photo Newsletter, Draper writes, “It is our endeavor to produce significant visual images of our time... We speak of our lives as only we can” to incite the group's dedication to self-determination through image-making.
The African American photographer Roy DeCarava was instrumental in guiding Kamoinge's visual language and philosophy. DeCarava was the collective's first director in 1963.Duganne, Erina. “Transcending the Fixity of Race: The Kamoinge Workshop and the Question of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in Photography.” New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. P.188. . p. 188. Retrieved January 9, 2020. It was at DeCarva's Sixth Avenue and West 38th Street loft that most of the group's meetings were held in the latter part of 1963.Anthony Barboza & Herb Robinson, eds; Vincent Alabiso, co-editor. “Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge.” Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 2015. p. 76
Retrieved January 10, 2020. Mannas presided over the Kamoinge Workshop as president from 1976 to 1977, and was acting director in 1979.
Though DeCarava's presidency was short-lived, he remained an active mentor to the group. DeCarava's photography aesthetic left an impression on the Kamoinge photographers, who began to adopt elements of his style, from his intense blacks to his rich shadows and grayscale, along with his photo-realist perspective. The Kamoinge Workshop members developed a range of photographic styles ranging from near-abstractions, social documentary realism, street photography, and portraiture, capturing images of Black people in America and around the world in black-and-white. Members were dedicated to challenging their formal aesthetic while remaining committed to using photography for socio-political reform. Apart from photography, the collective found inspiration from jazz, a music genre that became a soundtrack for the shifting politics of Black people in America, following the philosophical register of the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement. Jazz offered Kamoinge members the expansion they needed to make art without boundaries; it prompted them to become artistic, intellectual, and geographic explorers, as some members, like Mannas and Ming Smith, who photographed overseas in Guyana and Senegal. The improvisational spirit of jazz replicates itself in the Kamoinge photographs that offer motion and poetry that emanate from a still image. “They created art that embodied racial pride and self-assertion at the same time that, like jazz, transcended boundaries of genre and race.”
Louis Draper had a vital leadership role within the group, “writing many introductions and histories of the Kamoinge Workshop, from handwritten manuscripts on looseleaf paper to typescript drafts and published summaries.” In his statement in Photo Newsletter, Draper wrote about the collective's efforts to self-organize to support themselves and to create a forum of peers who would view their artworks with “honesty and understanding.” An example of this forum of peers manifested as Kamoinge Workshop Portfolio No. 1 (1964) and No. 2 (1965), now at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Fourteen out of fifteen of the members are featured in the portfolio, including Mannas. The Kamoinge portfolio “represents fifteen black photographers whose creative objectives reflect the concern for truth about the world, about society and about themselves.”
The collective continued to create open forums for themselves and other Black photographers outside the group. In 1973, Beuford Smith founded The Black Photographers Annual, a publication that featured photographs by Black artists, including Kamoinge members. With support from the book's editor, Joe Crawford, Smith published four volumes between 1973 and 1980, featuring written contributions by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Gordon Parks. In Annual's first issue, the esteemed Morrison described the suite of individual works as "some of the most powerful and poignant photography I have ever seen." Stating, "It hovers over the matrix of black life, takes accurate aim and explodes our sensibilities." The publication had enlisted multigenerational voices, including P.H. Polk, a groundbreaking African American photographer, who was 74-years-old at the time. His ten-page portfolio of distinctive works documenting an earlier era preceding Mannas's. The Annual was “thought of as the realization of community in book form.” The publication circulated among young photographers such as Marilyn Nance and Dawoud Bey, who sought out the community that Kamoinge had engendered. Mannas' photographers appear in The Black Photographers Annual, Volume I (1973) and Volume 2 (1974).
After the success of the Annual, several Kamoinge Workshop members, including Mannas, Beuford Smith, and Shawn Walker, joined with other photographers in the community to throw a dinner honoring photography elders. “The organizers named themselves the International Black Photographers (IBP). Eighty photographers attended the inaugural dinner in 1979, each attendee presenting two photographs in a related exhibition.” Following these gatherings in 1979 and 1980, “IBP began publishing what they intended to be a quarterly newsletter in the winter of 1981.” An initiative led by Mannas, the International Black Photographers Newsletter was another example of the Kamoinge Workshop's interest in community-building on a much broader, international scale, stating: “We must build a membership organization so that we can provide a communication channel, through this newsletter, and a way for our own work to be shown..and preserved, through an archive and be an advocacy group for Black photographers.”
Another form of self-authorship came in the form of a larger publication called Timeless (2015), edited by Herb Robinson and Anthony Barboza and co-edited by Vincent Alablso. Published in 2015, Timeless offers reading of the Kamoinge Workshop in the new millennium. Mannas has five images from his time in Guyana, including his well-known images The Shy Girls of Anna Regina, circa 1971-1974 and Motown Lady, circa 1971–1976.
Since its founding, Kamoinge Workshop has provided many contemporary Black photographers, including Mannas, a community and creative support. The collective has been instrumental in shaping a Black aesthetic in photography, while shifting the photographic representations of African American culture.
Artistic style and notable photographs