Howard Bingham

Howard Leonid Bingham was born on the twenty-ninth of May 1939 in Jackson, Mississippi, into a family shaped by faith and labor. His father, Willie Everrett Bingham, served as a minister and worked as a Pullman porter; his mother, Emmaline Bingham, kept their home. The family later moved west to Los Angeles, where the young Howard came of age.

Bingham's path to the camera was not immediate — he is said to have first stumbled in a photography course before finding his gift. In the early 1960s he apprenticed as a staff photographer at the Los Angeles Sentinel, one of the great Black newspapers of the era, and it was on assignment in 1962 that he was sent to photograph a brash young boxer from Louisville named Cassius Clay. From that meeting grew one of the most enduring friendships in American life.

For more than five decades Bingham was Muhammad Ali's constant companion and principal personal photographer, amassing an intimate record numbering in the hundreds of thousands of frames and producing the definitive volume Muhammad Ali: A Thirty-Year Journey. His lens also captured a turbulent nation: entrusted by the Black Panther Party — reportedly at Eldridge Cleaver's insistence — he made a singular photographic record of the movement, and his work appeared in Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Ebony and beyond.

Howard Bingham died on the fifteenth of December 2016 at the age of seventy-seven. He is honored as the faithful witness whose eye preserved a champion, a movement, and an age — a quiet man who gave history its face.