The New Black Vanguard

Estimated Reading Time: 6 min

We’re nearly halfway through Black History Month (the new Black Vanguard), and it’s already been an enormously eventful couple of weeks. BHM can be a fraught moment for marketers. From Barnes & Noble’s ill-fated “Diversity Editions” initiative to Google’s (in our opinion) more resonant approach, brands are engaging with the celebratory month to varying degrees of success. With that in mind, we wanted to take a moment to re-examine the conversation around diversity and inclusion through the lens of a recent, influential piece of Black cultural analysis. Read on for our findings:

The New Black Vanguard

Published in October 2019, The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion is Antwuan Sargent’s survey of the work of 15 groundbreaking Black image makers, including Renell Medrano and Quil Lemons, who work at the intersection of fine art and fashion. Sargent, an art critic and curator, critiques the exclusionary history of fashion photography and examines the emergence of a new class of creators redefining the medium. The images and striking art direction in the book are compelling enough on their own, but perhaps more compelling are the essays and interviews that contextualize the work and its distribution.

The creators have myriad approaches to image-making, from commercial to conceptual, realist to fantastical, ethereal to confrontational. But what’s consistently true for all of them is a conscious engagement with Black identity and how it functions in images. It’s not just about depicting Black people in a celebratory way, but unpacking the ways in which structural inequality has defined the default view of the world. Their work looks to lived experiences to find new ways of seeing. And it’s this critical engagement with identity that’s caused some of the culture’s most visible publications to re-examine their own ways of seeing.

Consider the Tyler Mitchell historic September 2018 Vogue cover featuring Beyoncé. It was the first Vogue cover shot by a Black photographer, which seems owed to the moral conviction of industry gatekeepers. Just over a year before the cover was released, Awol Erizku and Beyoncé collaborated on a series of photos to announce Beyoncé’s pregnancy. The pair explicitly chose her website and Instagram to showcase the photos, rather than any major publication. Erizku and Beyoncé had much more control on these platforms, and in less than 24 hours, the photos became the most liked in Instagram’s history. The impact that these Black artists had on their own channels was far greater than any mainstream publication could offer them. Vogue had little choice but to give unprecedented control to Beyoncé and her choice of photographer to shoot the September issue the following year.

Over the past few years, diverse representation has come to be conflated with structural change and progress. What The New Black Vanguard validates for us is that the conversation around diversity and inclusion is ready to expand beyond the limited question of representation. In 2020 and beyond, the questions become:

Who gets to define the visual landscape of our culture?

How does one’s lived experience inform their approach to making images and content?

How do we create the space for diverse creators’ points of view to come to life in the most complete and compelling way?

The New Black Vanguard demonstrates that, while there’s a deep well of diverse talent working behind the camera right now, the full potential of their creative visions can only be realized with like-minded people in positions of power to champion their work. The work highlighted in Sargent’s survey suggests the rapid approach of a future in which creators, Black and otherwise, are going to demand more creative control over the editorial voice of their work, deeper representation in the institutions with whom they work and true equity in the gains that their work garners. To quote a Twitter proverb:

Looking to dive deeper into the conversation around diversity and inclusion? Click here.

With love,

the projects*