A New Bedford native of Cape Verdean descent, Anthony Barboza has, throughout his influential career, demonstrated a deep compassion for and interest in telling the stories of Black American life and communities of color worldwide.

Barboza’s photographs resonate with beauty and grace. I Return With a Feeling of Us brings together a wide range of his personal and commercial work—including deeply felt observations of racial injustice and economic inequities, innovative fashion photography that helped redefine African-American aesthetics and representation, and masterful, revelatory portraits of celebrities and fellow creatives for which he is best known.

Organized thematically, each section traces pivotal moments in Barboza’s artistic evolution—from his early period of self-discovery and his vivid portrayals of 1970s Harlem, to the searing images of oppression in his 1993 series A Spiritual Echo. At once surreal, mysterious, elegiac, and soulful, Barboza’s photographs bear witness to history while reflecting on the artist’s role in society. His work moves fluidly between the personal and the political, the intimate and the collective, creating images that are as much about inner life as they are about shared experience. The thread uniting this body of work is the principle Barboza himself describes: “To me the most important thing is feeling and loving. Feeling and loving, feeling and loving.” It is this ethic of empathy and care that imbues his images with both their urgency and their timelessness.