The New Black Vanguard

The New Black Vanguard features artists whose vivid portraits and conceptual images merge art and fashion photography and break down long-established boundaries. Their work has been featured widely in fashion and society magazines, advertising campaigns and museums, as well as on their own social networks, re-instilling the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance.
These images open up the conversation around the representation of the black body and black life as a subject. Collectively, they celebrate black creativity and the hybridity between art, fashion and culture in the construction of an image. Seeking to challenge the idea that the black world is homogenous, the works serve as a form of visual activism. This is a perspective often found in this loose movement of emerging talents, who create photographs in very different contexts - New York and Johannesburg, Lagos and London. The results present new perspectives on the medium of photography and notions of race and beauty, gender and power.