“A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people,” Annie Leibovitz has said. Yet if you were looking at any of her portraits of Black women, you’d have a hard time seeing that love.
Last week, the famed Vogue photographer shared a sneak peek from the magazine’s September issue, which features a profile of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The images were a disaster, and the backlash on social media was just as chaotic, with Twitter users fuming over yet another failed attempt by Leibovitz to photograph Black women properly.
The portraits were taken at the National Mall, with the first of them depicting Brown Jackson leaning on a column, hidden behind the shadows while the large marble statue of Abraham Lincoln looms over her in the background. In the other, she is seated centrally with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool stretching behind her.
Both images have Brown Jackson’s skin tone looking exceptionally dull, and don’t portray any of the power and grace that one would expect from a Vogue profile of the first Black woman on the US supreme court. Many have also scrutinized the images’ composition. Having Abraham Lincoln be the focal point of the first image came off to many critics as projecting a white savior narrative. Brown Jackson is portrayed stepping into her new role as part of a larger tradition in the US government, while the man who, ostensibly, made it possible for a Black woman to even hold that position hangs literally over her head.
This is a longtime problem of Leibovitz’s. The photographer has dropped the ball many times in her depictions of other powerful Black women, including Simone Biles, Viola Davis, Serena Williams and Rihanna. In all cases, she manages to make her subjects look dull, ashy, pained and sad, a far cry from the lively and graceful people that they usually are.
And don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting there is some grand conspiracy concocted by Leibovitz (or Vogue for that matter) to make Black women look bad. The 72-year-old is famous for her portraits of world leaders, sports figures and the Hollywood elite, many of them captured in that same “dark” aesthetic.
The real issue is that when white people are her subject, Leibovitz manages to capture them beautifully in that style. But the dreary, low-light aesthetic simply does not work the same way on Black people. Leibovitz’s photographs are what happens when Blackness is seen through a white gaze that is incapable of capturing its true beauty.
While she may be one of the most accomplished photographers of her age, it’s clear she doesn’t have what it takes to photograph Black women in a way that shows their true light. And sometimes, what that takes is being Black.
In 2018, the New York photographer Tyler Mitchell made history when he photographed Beyoncé for Vogue’s September 2018 cover – making him the first Black person to do so in the magazine’s 128-year history. That fact alone is a shame, and a symbol of the woeful lack of diversity the magazine’s talent pool. Why does Leibovitz keep being called upon to do work that she’s clearly not qualified to do, while many talented Black photographers languish in obscurity?
Black women can be photographed beautifully in their most natural state without making their features look sad, washed out and completely unnatural.
There are many ways to capture Black women’s beauty, but whatever Annie Leibovitz is doing simply isn’t it.
Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
