Published by Aperture in 2019, *Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful* brings sustained attention to photographs through which Brathwaite helped give visual form to the “Black Is Beautiful” movement. Concentrating on work from the late 1950s and the 1960s, the monograph places image-making within a broader project of cultural self-definition: beauty, dress, music, and collective organization become inseparable from political expression.

Brathwaite’s practice developed alongside institutions he helped establish with his brother Elombe Brath. The African Jazz Arts Society and Studios brought together artists, designers, dancers, and playwrights, while the Grandassa Models, founded in 1962, challenged beauty standards centered on whiteness. Brathwaite’s portraits of the models therefore operate as more than fashion photographs. They articulate an alternative public image of Black womanhood grounded in self-possession, African diasporic identity, and communal purpose.

The book also moves beyond the studio into Harlem’s cultural networks. Informal and behind-the-scenes photographs of figures including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis connect Brathwaite’s portraiture to jazz and to the artistic life sometimes described as a second Harlem Renaissance. This range is one of the publication’s distinguishing qualities: carefully composed portraits and records of cultural activity together show photography functioning as art, documentation, and an instrument of social change.

Coinciding with a 2019 exhibition of Brathwaite’s work, this 144-page volume was identified by its publisher’s description as the first monograph devoted to his career. For a serious photography collection, its importance lies not in speculative rarity but in the concentrated account it provides of a photographer whose images linked aesthetics to organized cultural action. It offers a precise historical case study in how a political idea acquired faces, gestures, clothing, and settings—and how photographs helped that idea circulate.