Art critic and author Antwaun Sargent is curating the new show, Just Pictures. Hosted in collaboration with Barrett Barrera Projects at St Louis space, projects+gallery, the exhibition is a celebration of black photographers whose work sits at the intersection of fine art and fashion photography.

He has been drawn to those artists who distil the history of photography into their work to create a fresh expression of identity and documentation. "I am particularly interested in bringing together young image makers who are working between the commercial and conceptual by creating worlds entirely their own,” Sargent says. “Photographers who set their gazes on rethinking the possibility of photography by embracing its boundary blurring potential which allows the images to address desire, beauty and being. The resulting work has an aesthetic all its own and a power that is drawn from the way that the images operate in many different contexts, photographically and culturally."

Sargent’s first book, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Read our story on the book here), which celebrated the work of artists who are defining new standards of beauty and style, was hailed for its impeccable eye. And Just Pictures looks set to do the same thing with his pick of names from across the globe. Those featured include Moroccan Belgian photographer Mous Lamrabat, who shot the cover of Nataal’s second issue, Nigerian talents Ruth Ossai and Yagazie Emezi, New York transplants Arielle Bobb-Willis, Joshua Kissi, Joshua Woods and Renell Medrano and St Louis-based Justin Solomon.

"Central to these images is the collaborative complicity of the image maker and their subjects but also the seemingly disparate histories of photography, from landscape and vernacular to portraiture and fashion, that are pulled together in the making of each image that is widely circulated in museums and magazines, on social media and the walls of domestic space,” Sargent adds. “The way these images move rapidly between contexts, garnering new and often contradictory meanings, that allow them to simultaneously operate as racial representations while also being discrete product shots, documentations of family and glossies of the latest fashion trends. For this generation of emerging imagemakers, the photographer's eye is illimitable: a picture is just a picture.”

Just Pictures is on view at projects+gallery, St Louis, Missouri until 21 November 2020

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Published on 10/09/2020