Antwaun Sargent and Christoph Wiesner in Conversation

Join the Lucie Foundation for an online conversation with Antwaun Sargent, winner of the Lucie Photo Book Prize, and Christoph Wiesner, director at Rencontres d’Arles.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion presents fifteen artists, whose vibrant portraits and conceptual images fuse the genres of art and fashion photography in ways that break down long-established boundaries. Their work has been widely consumed in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns, and museums, as well as on their individual social-media channels, reinfusing the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance. The images open up conversations around the roles of the black body and black lives as subject matter; collectively, they celebrate black creativity and the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image. Seeking to challenge the idea that blackness is homogenous, the works serve as a form of visual activism. It’s a perspective often seen from this loose movement of emerging talents, who are creating photography in vastly different contexts—New York and Johannesburg, Lagos and London. The results—often made in collaboration with black stylists and fashion designers—present new perspectives on the medium of photography and the notions of race and beauty, gender and power.

Antwaun Sargent is the author of the The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion published by Aperture, winner of the Lucie Photo Book Prize, Traditional Category.

Image: © Dana Scruggs