percybartle: Brian Shumway - Black Girl “Black Girl is a portrait series about real, ordinary women
percybartle: Brian Shumway - Black Girl “Black Girl is a portrait series about real, ordinary women who dream of being models. Countless women aspire to be models, due in part to the ubiquity and appeal of reality television shows like “America’s Next Top Model” on contemporary American culture. Fashion for decades has struggled with racial inclusion. Black women’s unique beauty and style are especially seen as a curse and, consequently, they are severely under-represented. However, historically a few success stories exist, like Tyra Banks, Dorothea Towles and Donyale Luna. Titled after a Lenny Kravitz song, Black Girl is not a fashion series. It is an alternative to the fashion industry’s one-dimensional world, where one class of people (often affluent, educated, and white) narrowly circumscribe beauty, desire, and style. Without mimicking fashion visual’s language, Black Girl fuses modeling, portraiture and documentary photography. Creating a fantasy-based narrative juxtaposed against New York’s stark urban reality, the women become characters in a story shaped by their own tastes and sensibilities. Black Girl is thus a collaborative project where beauty, fantasy, race, sexuality, and identity intersect, extolling the unique allure of real black women who, though devalued, refuse to stop dreaming.” website -- source link