Photography Between Art and Fashion | The New Black Vanguard
“The New Black Vanguard is a contemporary black fashion photography that is inclusive and reflective of a wider world —in terms of skin color, body type, performativity of gender, and class— and also captures, celebrates, and expands the notions of beauty and agency.” — Antwaun Sargent.
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© Arielle Bobb-Willis
© Awol Erizku
© Scruggs.
© Addy
© Nxedlana
Featuring the black figure and black runway and cover models in the media and art has been a marker of increasingly inclusive fashion and art communities. More critically, however, the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body has been reinfused with new vitality and substance, thanks to an increase in powerful images authored by an international community of black photographers.
In The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today.
The New Black Vanguard represents a movement of young photographers of color working with reference to and in connection with one other, dealing with issues of race, beauty, and sexuality. These artists challenge the fashion establishment and craft a new language for speaking visually about politics and representation through distinct ways of conveying pose, movement, and expression in highly powerful, untraditional ways.
In his richly illustrated essay, Sargent opens up a conversation around the role of the black body in the marketplace; the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image; and the institutional barriers that have historically impeded black photographers from participating more fully in the fashion (and art) industries.
GROUNDBREAKING CONTEMPORARY FASHION PHOTOGRAPHERS
Fifteen artist portfolios feature groundbreaking contemporary fashion photographers, including Tyler Mitchell, the first black photographer hired to shoot a cover story for Vogue; Campbell Addy, founder of the Nii Agency and Niijournal; and Nadine Ijewere, whose early series title, The Misrepresentation of Representation, says it all.
The book also features a series of intergenerational conversations, including scholar Deborah Willis and Tyler Mitchell on shifting notions of beauty; photographers Shaniqwa Jarvis and Renell Medrano on the challenges of being solitary black, female voices in the fashion and magazine industry; Daniel Obasi and Stephen Tayo on the current Nigerian youthquake and Afrofuturism; artists Mickalene Thomas and Quil Lemons on family and queer communities; and Campbell Addy and Jamal Nxedlana on their use of publishing platforms to push diverse storytelling across the African diaspora and in fashion. Together, these images and stories chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the commercial black image, while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.
© Tyler Mitchell
WHO IS ANTWAUN SARGENT
Antwaun Sargent is a writer and critic living and working in New York City. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, W, Vogue, and other publications. He has contributed essays to museum and gallery publications on Ed Clark, Mickalene Thomas, Arthur Jafa, Deborah Roberts, and Yinka Shonibare, among other artists. Sargent has lectured and participated in public conversations with artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, MCA Denver, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Harvard and Yale universities. He has also co-organized a number of exhibitions, including The Way We Live Now at Aperture, Then and Now: Chase Hall and Cameron Welch at Jenkins Johnson Projects, and the traveling exhibition Young, Gifted and Black. The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion is his first book.
© Micaiah Carter
© Campbell Addy
WHO IS ANTWAUN SARGENT
Antwaun Sargent is a writer and critic living and working in New York City. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, W, Vogue, and other publications. He has contributed essays to museum and gallery publications on Ed Clark, Mickalene Thomas, Arthur Jafa, Deborah Roberts, and Yinka Shonibare, among other artists. Sargent has lectured and participated in public conversations with artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, MCA Denver, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Harvard and Yale universities. He has also co-organized a number of exhibitions, including The Way We Live Now at Aperture, Then and Now: Chase Hall and Cameron Welch at Jenkins Johnson Projects, and the traveling exhibition Young, Gifted and Black. The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion is his first book.
