The family moved to Harlem when Mr. Brathwaite was a child, before settling in the South Bronx. A standout student, he attended the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan. He was mulling a career in graphic design when, at 17, he saw a searing image that would change the course of his life.
The photograph was of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old from Chicago who had been tortured and killed by white men while visiting relatives in Mississippi, supposedly for flirting with a white woman. Emmett’s mother’s decision to display this horror to the world — the photo, by David Jackson, was first published in Jet magazine — was a watershed moment for the civil rights movement and demonstrated to Mr. Brathwaite that photography could have a profound political impact.
Before long, he was honing his craft, toting his Hasselblad medium-format camera into the smoky jazz clubs of the city. In August 1959, he trained his lens on the biggest names in jazz — among them Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis — at the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival in Manhattan. The three-night bill read like a jazz hall of fame.
As Adam Bradley noted in a 2021 profile in The New York Times’s T magazine, Mr. Brathwaite was a tenor saxophone player himself and as a photographer had a feel for when to snap the shutter at moments of peak emotion in a performance. As his son, Kwame Jr., put it, “He understood the valleys and the crescendos of music, the improvisation and how that all builds into those moments where a musician is in a zone, similar to an athlete.”
At the same time, Mr. Brathwaite was spending countless hours in the darkroom finding ways to highlight Black faces and features, tinkering, as his son said, with “lighting and exposure times in the printing process to account for the fact that film is not calibrated for darker skin.”
By the early 1970s, Mr. Brathwaite’s love of music led him to expand his horizons to chronicling reggae, soul and pop, a photographic odyssey that lasted decades. As Mr. Bradley wrote, Mr. Brathwaite functioned as a de facto house photographer for the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and over the years he captured memorable images of Bob Marley, Sly Stone, Whitney Houston and many others.