Viewing The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion

There’s a lot of buzz around Saatchi Gallery’s autumn show — and for good reason. Curated by American writer and critic Antwaun Sargent, The New Black Vanguard features 15 international Black photographers, including Tyler Mitchell, Renell Medrano and Quil Lemons, who are contributing to a new vision of the Black figure in art and fashion.

A celebration of Black creativity and culture, it seeks to start conversations around the representation of the Black body and Black lives as subject matter, while presenting new perspectives on the notions of race, beauty, gender and power in contemporary photography.

Notable highlights include Tyler Mitchell’s portrait of a young woman in a pink floral hijab and Dana Scruggs’s 2019 portrait of a model in a crimson red dress on the beach. Also noteworthy is Campbell Addy’s striking portrait of the model Adut Akech in a light pink Valentino dress.

Images created by emerging Black photographers, dedicated to bringing a new set of experiences and references to contemporary image making, are shown alongside a vitrine of publications that contextualise them. Book now.