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Untitled, from the Baptismal series
Untitled, from the Baptismal series

Untitled, from the Baptismal series

Artist (American, born 1940)
Date1987
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 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)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineAcquired through the Frank and Margaret Robinson Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Endowment
Terms
  • Photographs
  • American
Object number2022.010
Label CopyThis 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.”
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