Anthony Barboza is a world-renowned African American photographer and historian who is an equally gifted  artist, painter and writer. In his prolific career he has shot advertisements for giant corporations like Burger King, Coca-Cola, Coors, General Motors, Kodak, L’Oreal, Revlon and Sony, along with fashion and street photography, album art (Miles Davis, Cameo, Roberta Flack), books (Nathan McCall, X, X) and movie posters (Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, CB4). Those works, and his personal art projects, have catapulted him to the front ranks of influential image-makers of the last 62 years.  

After moving from New Bedford, Mass. to New York in 1963, he was introduced to Kamoinge Workshop, a prominent collective of Black photographers. Anthony was the group’s president from 2005-2016.  

Anthony began in commercial art in 1968, during the Black Arts Movement. 

His reverence for jazz music is reflected in a major focus of his work over a 10-year span beginning in the  late ’70s. Many of the prints are included in his series “Black Borders,” published in 1980 with a grant from the  National Endowment for the Arts. The portraits of major figures from Black culture -- everything from fashion  and music, to theater, publishing, visual arts, dance and sports -- evoked the styles and strengths of each  subject. “When I do a portrait, I’m doing a photograph of how that person feels to me; how I feel about the  person, not how they look,” 

In the 1980s, the Japanese liquor shōchū hired him to co-direct a TV spot featuring his friend and jazz legend  Miles Davis. He has also taken assignments from leadings magazines and newspapers, with spreads in Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, GQ, Ms., Vanity Fair, Vogue, Art News, Black Enterprise, Ebony, Vibe, Interview, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Life, The Village Voice and USA Weekend.  

1980 Won National Endowment of the Arts Grant for the Black Borders series. 

Self-published Black Borders from the grant. 

1981 Judged National Endowment of the Arts. Question why? They said because I was the top vote getter the  previous year. 

In 2015, Anthony edited the coffee table book “Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge” (Schiffer). He is a multiple  winner of the CEBA Award for black advertising. Anthony has also lectured at Cornell, the International Center  of Photography, Oberlin College, Ohio University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been an adjunct  professor in the Photography Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

Howard Univ. James A. Porter Lifetime Achievement Award 2019 

In 2022, the Getty Museum published Anthony Barboza newest book "Eye reaming"

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