Harry Belafonte, 1954

Harry Belafonte (b. 1927) is a Grammy award-winning singer who popularised calypso, a style of Afro-Caribbean music, with an international audience and starred in several films and Broadway shows. A supporter of the civil rights movement in the United States, he was a friend and confidant of Martin Luther King Jr, and has continued his social activism in a number of causes.

The portrait photographer Dorothy Wilding shot several beautiful photographs of the young Belafonte in her New York studio in February 1954, including this brooding and pensive image. It was a moment of rising stardom for the singer, yet he has since written in his autobiography My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance (2011) that at the time he was grappling with his dual heritage: ‘My racial identity confused me still; I was black, yes, but West Indian, playing to white audiences – a cultural hybrid, in between.’

National Portrait Gallery, London Given by the photographer's sister, Susan Morton, 1976
© National Portrait Gallery, London