“A factor that you just see in my footage is that I used to be not afraid to fall in love with these folks,” Annie Leibovitz has stated. But in the event you have been taking a look at any of her portraits of Black girls, you’d have a tough time seeing that love.
Final week, the famed Vogue photographer shared a sneak peek from the journal’s September difficulty, which contains a profile of Supreme Courtroom Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The pictures have been a catastrophe, and the backlash on social media was simply as chaotic, with Twitter customers fuming over yet one more failed try by Leibovitz to {photograph} Black girls correctly.
The portraits have been taken on the Nationwide Mall, with the primary of them depicting Brown Jackson leaning on a column, hidden behind the shadows whereas the big marble statue of Abraham Lincoln looms over her within the background. Within the different, she is seated centrally with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool stretching behind her.
Each pictures have Brown Jackson’s pores and skin tone wanting exceptionally boring, and don’t painting any of the facility and beauty that one would count on from a Vogue profile of the primary Black girl on the US supreme courtroom. Many have additionally scrutinized the pictures’ composition. Having Abraham Lincoln be the focus of the primary picture got here off to many critics as projecting a white savior narrative. Brown Jackson is portrayed moving into her new function as half of a bigger custom within the US authorities, whereas the person who, ostensibly, made it attainable for a Black girl to even maintain that place hangs actually over her head.
It is a longtime drawback of Leibovitz’s. The photographer has dropped the ball many occasions in her depictions of different highly effective Black girls, together with Simone Biles, Viola Davis, Serena Williams and Rihanna. In all instances, she manages to make her topics look boring, ashy, pained and unhappy, a far cry from the energetic and swish those who they normally are.
And don’t get me flawed; I’m not suggesting there’s some grand conspiracy concocted by Leibovitz (or Vogue for that matter) to make Black girls look dangerous. The 72-year-old is known for her portraits of world leaders, sports activities figures and the Hollywood elite, lots of them captured in that very same “darkish” aesthetic.
The true difficulty is that when white individuals are her topic, Leibovitz manages to seize them superbly in that fashion. However the dreary, low-light aesthetic merely doesn’t work the identical manner on Black folks. Leibovitz’s images are what occurs when Blackness is seen via a white gaze that’s incapable of capturing its true magnificence.
Whereas she could also be one of the vital completed photographers of her age, it’s clear she doesn’t have what it takes to {photograph} Black girls in a manner that exhibits their true gentle. And generally, what that takes is being Black.
In 2018, the New York photographer Tyler Mitchell made historical past when he photographed Beyoncé for Vogue’s September 2018 cowl – making him the primary Black individual to take action within the journal’s 128-year historical past. That reality alone is a disgrace, and a logo of the woeful lack of variety the journal’s expertise pool. Why does Leibovitz hold being referred to as upon to do work that she’s clearly not certified to do, whereas many proficient Black photographers languish in obscurity?
Black girls will be photographed superbly of their most pure state with out making their options look unhappy, washed out and fully unnatural.
There are lots of methods to seize Black girls’s magnificence, however no matter Annie Leibovitz is doing merely isn’t it.
