He didn’t have a camera yet, but Anthony Barboza was going to become a photographer. The 19-year-old saved up wages from his two jobs and in 1963 made the move from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to New York. He enrolled in a photography school that he’d picked at random from the phone book, but the real education came months later, when his aunt’s friend Adger Cowans took him to a Kamoinge meeting.

Kamoinge (which means “a group of people working together” in the East African Kikuyu language) was a photography collective not yet a year old. The members wanted to create a supportive environment to nurture one another’s artistic growth through discussion and critique, and they wanted to push for the inclusion of black photographers in exhibitions. But beyond personal ambitions, they wanted to create more positive and nuanced visual narratives to counteract stereotypes seen in newspapers and on the screen. Barboza dropped out of school to learn from his newfound mentors. One day he would become the group’s director, but first he needed to buy a camera.