cover of The New Black Vanguard

The acclaimed New York-based curator and writer Antwaun Sargent discusses his recently published book The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, with Pippa Oldfield, Head of Programme at Impressions Gallery. Programme as part of our Online Photobook Fair 2020.

“The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion presents 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 representation 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”.

– Aperture Foundation, 2019

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion features photographs by Campbell Addy, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Micaiah Carter, Awol Erizku, Nadine Ijewere, Quil Lemons, Namsa Leuba, Renell Medrano, Tyler Mitchell, Jamal Nxedlana, Daniel Obasi, Ruth Ossai, Adrienne Raquel, Dana Scruggs, and Stephen Tayo. Published by Aperture, New York, 2019.

Available from our Bookshop priced £40.

To join the event click the Zoom link here https://zoom.us/j/93446753049

In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery
In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery
In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery
In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery
In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery
In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery
In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery
In Conversation: Antwaun Sargent — Impressions Gallery

Biography

  • Antwaun Sargent Headshot

    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 to essays in museums 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.