In The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The featuring of the Black figure and Black runway and cover models in the media and art has been one marker of increasingly inclusive fashion and art communities. More critically, however, the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body has been reinfused with new vitality and substance thanks to an increase in powerful images authored by an international community of Black photographers. In a richly illustrated essay, Sargent opens up the conversation around the role of the Black body in the marketplace; the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image; and the institutional barriers that have historically been an impediment to Black photographers participating more fully in the fashion (and art) industries. Fifteen artist portfolios feature the brightest contemporary fashion photographers, including Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer hired to shoot a cover story for American Vogue; Campbell Addy, founder of the Nii Agency and journal; and Nadine Ijewere, whose early series title, The Misrepresentation of Representation, says it all. Alongside a series of conversations between generations, their images and stories chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the commercial Black image, while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.

Namsa Leuba: Crossed Looks is the first artist monograph featuring the work of Swiss-Guinean artist Namsa Leuba. This publication accompanies the first solo exhibition of Namsa Leuba in the United States, at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina on August 27 - December 11, 2021. Crossed Looks features Leuba's major projects to date, including photography series in Guinea, South Africa, Nigeria, Benin, and the debut of a new series recently made in Tahiti. The exhibition and publication consider how Leuba's photographic practice explores the representation of African identity and the cultural Other in the Western imagination. Over 90 photographs inspired by the visual culture and ceremonies of West Africa, contemporary fashion and design, and the history of photography and its colonizing gaze present Leuba's unique perspective that straddles reality and fantasy. Through the adaptation of myths attributed to the Other, Leuba's photographs acknowledge this double act of looking, a cross-dialogue of global cultures. The exhibition is supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Pro Helvetia. The publication features essays contributed by exhibition curator Joseph Gergel; writer and art critic Emmanuel Iduma; and art historian Dr. Mary Trent. These essays examine the nuanced themes of identity and representation in Leuba's multiple bodies of work.