Detroit welcomes the start of a new era in Black fashion photography

The first exhibition of its kind pays homage to Detroit’s generation of incumbent black fashion photographers. Opening last weekend, The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion will feature the work of 15 pioneering photographers in more than 100 portraits, editorials, and trial shots, stolen from magazines, advertising campaigns and social media. The Black experience is anything but monolithic and most of these featured artists, from Nigeria, South Africa, London and New York, are not yet 30 years old. This gives the exhibits a “very dynamic, youthful” quality, as Nancy Barr, the museum’s curator, puts it.

From Micaiah Carter to Campbell Addy to Ruth Ossai, this exhibition honors some of today’s best-selling creatives. This includes Tyler Mitchell, who became the first black photographer to shoot a US cover Mode, did so with Beyoncé’s image – although she was well on her way to changing the face of fashion image before then. Known for his portrayal of Black utopias, such as the series I Did Pretty Hood In My Pink Polo, which he created with Dazed in 2016, Mitchell has been trying for a long time to visualize what he called a “variety of possible expressions for the black man of the future”.

New Black Pioneers first appeared as a beefy coffee table in 2019, led by writer and critic Antwaun Sargent. Plans for a physical exhibition were ultimately thwarted by the pandemic, but the institute’s curators persisted, believing the work was worthy of distribution. “They all use the medium of fashion photography as a form of social justice, by infusing the Black experience sometimes in new ways or in traditional ways,” says Barr. “They show a variety of Black experiences and Black identities in the present. I thought it had never happened before.”

Another photographer highlighted at the event was Dana Scruggs, the first black female photographer to shoot Rolling stone end of 2019, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Awol Erizku, Jamal Nxedlana, Nadine Ijewere, Renell Medrano, Adrienne Raquel, Quil Lemons, Stephen Tayo, Daniel Obasi, and Namsa Leuba. Not long ago Bottega Veneta descended on Detroit to hold his Salon 03 event, but came under fire from locals for not inviting many of the city’s leading black creatives. “For me, what’s more important is that Detroit is the city with the largest black population in the nation,” Barr continued, “this show helps reach out to that community and the young people in that community as well.”

The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion will run until April 17, 2022 at the Detroit Institute of the Arts