Object Details
Artist
Shawn Walker
Date
1987
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image: 8 3/8 × 12 1/2 inches (21.3 × 31.8 cm)
Sheet: 10 7/8 × 13 7/8 inches (27.6 × 35.2 cm)
Credit Line
Acquired through the Frank and Margaret Robinson Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Endowment
Object
Number
2022.010
This 1987 photograph by Shawn Walker, an original member of the Kamoinge Workshop collective of Blac(…)
This 1987 photograph by Shawn Walker, an original member of the Kamoinge Workshop collective of Black photographers, shows a street baptism in Harlem. The annual event had been taking place for fifty years, held each August by the United House of Prayer for All People, a Pentecostal church on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Walker, a lifelong resident of Harlem, never knew about these mass baptisms until he one day spotted two women dressed in white pass by a local coffee shop where he was having coffee. As he put it in a 2017 interview, “Any photographer that’s been out here in the world, you see two people in white, you follow.”