The Sweet Breath of Life
Words and images come together in a collaboration between celebrated poet Ntozake Shange and an acclaimed group of photographers, to result in this stunning celebration of contemporary Black life in America.
From the first publication of The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava in 1967, to Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats, collaborations between writers and photographers have been important in African American culture. These books examine the issues of identity and representation that have been so central to this group’s efforts to thrive.
The Kamoinge Workshop photographers who contributed their work to this inspiring collection consist of names that have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and more. Names such as Anthony Barboza, Adger W. Cowans, Ming Smith Murray, Beuford Smith, John Pinderhuges, and many others. The Workshop’s mission was a response from the bias portrayals of African Americans in the media. They sought to shed positive light on their subjects, as well as to demystify Black life in America. And The Sweet Breath of Life does exactly that.
Praise & Reviews
Poem follows photo in this 7″ x 8-5/16″ collection of 135 b&ws taken by the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of African-American photographers founded in 1963. Ostensibly of the African-American family, the photos are not necessarily constrained to what one typically thinks of as “family shots”; rather, they show women, men and children both together and separately, as much outside as inside, as much in large social groups as with “nuclear” families. The effect of this is to expand the definition of “family” to include “location”—the street furniture of sidewalks, stoops and cars becomes as essential to human interaction as dinner plates and birthday cakes. The poems, by playwright and poet Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide…), are most often literal interpretations of the images, tracing facial expressions and body postures in text. While Shange’s gritty, contracted style complements the unadorned and intimate images, at times a less narrative explication of the images would have allowed a little breathing space between mediums—the close interrelation is sometimes claustrophobic, with a “story” pre-empting independent appreciation. It’s certainly easy to understand the urge to overexplain one’s family, but in these cases, the power and humanity of the images are self-explanatory.
—Publishers Weekly
The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), by poet Langston Hughes and photographer Roy DeCarava, brilliantly revealed the everyday lives of African Americans in Harlem, gave voice to unheard citizens, and inspired generations of African American writers and photographers to dispel stereotypes and tell their own stories. The Sweet Breath of Life pays direct tribute to Hughes and DeCarava and continues their narrative. Here, the sometimes raw but mostly potent poetry of Shange sings alongside wonderful photographs, mostly portraits, by members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a photography group of which DeCarava was once president. The images and poems span a lifetime, capturing the rapture of certain moments, the pain and anger of others, and profound but often unseen and unsung glimpses of ordinary life. One would be hard-pressed to say whether poetry or photography dominates this book, for they are inherently intertwined and equally expressive, uniting to create a book that will be treasured by anyone with an interest in poetry, photography, or human nature.
—Booklist