Having traveled from New Bedford to New York and back, world-renowned photographer Anthony Barboza now holds his first retrospective in his hometown. “I Return With a Feeling of Us” reflects the lifework of a photographer who is intensely receptive to the humanity around him. Barboza deals in film and feeling, and embraces the vast capacities of photography. Across street scenes, jazz clubs, and studio setups, the photographer shoots both color and black-and-white to capture celebrities and unnamed sitters alike. The site of the exhibition marks the place where he learned how to feel. Through his interactions with his community and growing up with his grandmother, mother, and aunt in New Bedford, Barboza learned to be sensitive to the nature of others. He has carried this sensibility with him throughout his career, remaining attuned to the essence of each of his sitters and careful not to project preconceptions onto them.
At age nineteen—before owning a camera—Barboza moved to New York City and became a member of the famed Kamoinge Workshop (now Kamoinge, Inc.), a collective dedicated to honoring and documenting the African diaspora through the lenses of Black photographers. While he remains based in New York, Barboza traces Black life all over. His stint in the Navy brought him to Florida in the mid-to-late sixties, and later he would travel abroad to places like Senegal and Morocco. On display at the New Bedford Art Museum, offshoot galleries organize his work thematically around the museum’s central corridor: Jazz/Harlem/The Beauty of Us, Portraits: Arts & Letters, Africa and the Middle East, Icons, and Discovery. There is ample overlap across each category—the case to place portraits of Aretha Franklin, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), Miles Davis, and James Baldwin in multiple sections could easily be made.
Several of the photographs in the show, organized in partnership with the New Bedford Historical Society, feature those who live and breathe with their creative practice. For Miles from Under Arrest, a striking 1985 portrait of Miles Davis, Barboza etches indelible marks onto the negative: a zigzag pattern across the upper black margin and a signature and date along the lower margin. Holding his trumpet before his heart with one hand, the instrument reads as if it is among the anatomical systems of the genius jazz musician. With the other hand, Davis tips his hat and stares straight ahead with one eye covered and the other piercingly meeting the edge of a fellow artist’s instrument—the photographer’s lens. It is in this way that Barboza’s portraits characteristically capture an image of his sitters while also speaking to his connection with them. In his own words: “When you are honest and trustworthy, and carry in your body a certain feeling, the subject feels you as quickly as you feel them.”
Easter Sunday in Harlem (1974) is a simple yet spirited environmental portrait of three boys joyously leaning on one another and smiling big in their finest clothing in front of a graffitied brick wall. The contrast of grit and grace captures the “Sunday best” tradition still going strong during the seventies in New York City. Barboza nods to walls of graffiti inside his studio as well by improvising unique backdrops based on the feelings his sitters give him. Toukie Smith – Model (1980) and Lester Bowie and Brass Fantasy, NYC (ca. 1980), for instance, offer glimpses of the backdrops he created by slashing and spray painting abstractly on large rolls of paper upon his sitters’ arrival to his studio.
The majority of Barboza’s portraits have careful yet uncomplicated compositions, but in the “Discovery” section of the show, Ancestors – New York, NY (1982) breaks from this simplicity. Using a double exposure, the image stacks the figure of a nude woman in two poses and a white bird captured far right in one exposure and top center in another. Numerous symbolic objects are scattered throughout this image—a pick comb, feathers, cutout images of eyes and lips, a small sculpture in a traditional African style. By this point in his career, Barboza was already an established photographer collaborating with the stars and traveling across the Atlantic. It is inspiring to see how he remains committed to artistic experimentation.
“I Return With a Feeling of Us” evinces Barboza’s practice of feeling his way to his final images. It requires a release of preconceptions and an open-hearted approach to every interaction. Whether with the aim of making photographs or not, his work calls upon us to allow feeling to be the means through which we make human connections that are rooted in love, respect, understanding, and acceptance.
“I Return With a Feeling of Us” is on view through November 23, 2025, at the New Bedford Art Museum, 608 Pleasant Street, New Bedford, MA.
