What You Didn’t Know About Barkley L. Hendricks

The less celebrated side of the artist’s career, his photographs, receive deserved attention in a new book.

Barkley L. Hendricks portrayed Black people who exude attitude. “In the Black community, you stand out because you declare your own sense of identity beyond your environment,” said his longtime friend Richard J. Watson, artist-in-residence at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. “When you see yourself shown as a standout — and not because you haven’t eaten in three days and you’re a symbol of poverty — that gives you respectability.” In the style of Manet and Velázquez, Hendricks painted full-length portraits of men and women who, with swagger and brio, project forcefully at a viewer. He typically painted his figures with overlaid washes of thin oil paint and set them against a monochromatic background that he applied in fast-drying acrylics. But Hendricks, who died in 2017, was a photographer as well as a painter. This less celebrated side of his career is receiving deserved attention in a book, “Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography,” to be published early next month. It includes a relatively small selection of the unorganized trove of photos that he left in his home in New London, Conn., and which his widow, Susan Hendricks, and dealer, Jack Shainman, have been exploring and cataloging since his death.