Kamoinge Digital Archive

In January, 2024, the Mellon Foundation supported the creation of a living digital archive  of Kamoinge’s photographs and history in partnership with The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of African American Art and African Diasporic Visual Culture (DCDC).

The collaboration between the DCDC and Kamoinge complements the rich interdisciplinary heritage that the David C. Driskell Center has established; while expanding access to Kamoinge for the public, academic, professional, and fine art audiences worldwide. 

Kamoinge, like the David C. Driskell Center, upholds the preservation of interdisciplinary Black cultural practices that embrace, celebrate, catalog, and document the best examples of artistic excellence.

Kamoinge members represent more than 1,634 years of insight into telling stories that reflect the history of the human condition throughout the African Diaspora via photography. Kamoinge is committed to the way photographs by, and about Black people are catalysts for transformative social change through a universal language liberated from words or sound.

Like ambassadors, Kamoinge represents 140 million people from disparate languages and cultures through documentary, photojournalism, reportage, abstract and portraiture styles.

The digitalization of Kamoinge contributes to expanding research into 20th-century photographers of African descent from 1963 to the present. Kamoinge is the oldest active not-for-profit photography organization in the United States. It is the first to nurture the development of Black visual culture through photography.

This collective continues to provide an oasis for growth, exploration, and discovery for its members and generations of photographers through various community and institutional outreach initiatives in the United States and Africa. 

Kamoinge has a specific perspective as a change agent that universalizes the particulars of Black visual culture through the intellectual and aesthetic diversity of its members.

Public access to the archive is forthcoming.