Louis Draper, Plucked From Obscurity

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Until recently, histories of photography would have ignored Louis H. Draper â€" not because of the quality of his photographs, but because of the color of his skin. With the exception of Gordon Parks, African-Americans were mostly glossed over or excluded altogether.

But over the last 25 years, a new generation of historians and curators have worked to pluck from obscurity photographers who were marginalized because of color, gender, geography or class. Those efforts were often thwarted by the loss of photographers’ papers and prints. Luckily, Mr. Draper had preserved an archive, and in recent years, his work has risen in visibility and esteem.

Louis H. Draper Date unknown.

Candela Books + Gallery, in Richmond, Va., will host a major career retrospective in early 2014. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has added several of his prints to its permanent collection, some of which will be part of the exhibition “Signs of Protest: Photographs From the Civil Rights Era,” which opens next spring.

Members of Kamoinge, a community of like-minded black photographers that Mr. Draper helped to create in the early 1960s, have long appreciated his lyrical work.

“Lou Draper’s photographs of blacks in the streets of Harlem showed their dignity, grace and sense of pride,” Shawn Walker, a member of Kamoinge, told Ten 8 magazine in 1987. “His photographs were printed so well, they were three-dimensional. I’d never seen such beautiful photographs of ordinary black people.”

Mr. Draper was born in 1935 just beyond the city limits of Richmond, in a house that his sister, Nell Draper-Winston, still calls home. The family, she said, was “poor in money, but rich in everything else.” Their father was an amateur photographer, but in high school, Mr. Draper’s passion was baseball.

Ms. Draper-Winston said that the family valued education, and that college was the unquestioned destination for her and her brother. Mr. Draper began to dabble in photography while attending the then-segregated Virginia State College (now, University) in Petersburg.

It was there, his sister said, that “the bug hit him.”

In a 1998 interview for an in-house publication at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey, where he taught for 20 years, he drolly attributed his new enthusiasm for photography to “divine intervention.” One day, he had found the catalog for the photography exhibition “Family of Man,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955, on the bed in his dormitory room.

As he leafed through its pages, he was “just mesmerized.”

“That book really gave me a direction,” he said. The faces that populated the gritty black-and-white images by some of the world’s leading photographers especially captivated him.

Mr. Draper never learned who had placed the catalog on his bed. He called it “a gift from God.”

By 1957, he said in the 1998 interview, he was overcome by “a mad desire to study photography.” Like many young people before and since, he set his sights on New York City, the capital of American photography. There, he found the instruction and mentoring that he craved from the photographers Roy DeCarava, Harold Feinstein and W. Eugene Smith (each of whom was included in “Family of Man”) and from the poet Langston Hughes.

Louis H. Draper Langston Hughes at his typewriter, circa 1960.

“I knew he was passionate about his work,” his sister said. “You could see it. His real joy came from capturing the character of everyday people.”

By the time Mr. Draper died in 2002, he had become a respected member of the photographic community in New York but was little known beyond it, despite numerous exhibitions, publications and awards. In his hometown, his work was virtually unknown.

The recent reappraisal of his photography would not have been possible without the efforts of his sister, Ms. Draper-Winston, who preserved his archive, and the friends who organized it. The archive allows writers and curators to assess Mr. Draper’s 45-year career as a whole, perhaps for the first time.

Margaret O’Reilly, a curator at the New Jersey State Museum, who is editing a book of Mr. Draper’s photography, described him as a significant artist who “captured the cultural zeitgeist of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, particularly in New York.”

Louis H. Draper “Ace,” date unknown.

At the time of his death, his extensive collection of photographs, negatives and slides was not an archive in any meaningful sense. It was an unorganized mass of material that nearly overwhelmed his office at Mercer County Community College, where he had led the photography program. The task of bringing order to chaos fell to his friend Gary Saretzky, an archivist and photographer, with the assistance of John Sunkiskis, a colleague at the college.

The nearly 1,000 prints in the collection include the street photography at which Mr. Draper excelled, as well as abstract images, portraits and photographs from within the United States and from his trips to Senegal and the Soviet Union.

“I spent almost every Sunday for a year putting the archive together,” Mr. Saretzky said. “Lou was a real pack rat. Boxes were stacked everywhere.”

Mr. Saretzky turned the archive over to Ms. Draper-Winston, who spent several years looking for a home for it. A turning point came last year, when she showed the archive to Sarah Eckhardt, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She appreciated the significance of the work, especially Mr. Draper’s “beautiful sense of light” and his use of murals, signs and graffiti to create “images within images.” She suggested that Ms. Draper-Winston show the archive to Gordon Stettinius, the founder and director of Candela Books + Gallery.

Mr. Stettinius was immediately drawn to the photographs.

“It’s a compelling body of work and a chance to revisit history,” he said. “Besides, it’s a Richmond story.”

The exhibition he is curating will explore Mr. Draper’s street photography, which exudes elegance, compassion and often wit; his portraits of prominent African-Americans, which Mr. Stettinius says have “great cultural potency”; and his more abstract images.

None of this belated acclaim surprises members of Kamoinge, the photographers who knew Mr. Draper the best.

“He was an artist first, a photographer second,” Mr. Walker said. “Cameras were incidental to Lou.”

Louis H. Draper Date unknown.

John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. Follow him â€" @johnedwinmason â€" and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.