This content was created by Sue Warnke. This content was uploaded by Sue Warnke. This is a YouTube video titled "Adrienne Raquel Captures Women of Color Through Her Photos | Squarespace Making It" (published June 20, 2018). The excerpt is a first-person segment featuring photographer and art director Adrienne Raquel speaking about moving to New York broke, leaving a full‑time job to pursue freelance photography, growing visibility via social media, and intentionally capturing and representing women of color to challenge misrepresentation and highlight overlooked beauty. Metadata includes the YouTube thumbnail and the 2018 timestamp.
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When I moved here, I was just broke as fuck. Like, I was broke. My name is Adrienne Raquel, and I'm a photographer and art director here in New York City. When I was in college, like, I just knew that this is what I wanted to do, and I knew that Houston is just not the place to do that. So I just kind of told my parents, like, I'm gonna move to New York, and they were like, with what money? It was a point in time where I was working my full-time job, and I was there for almost 2 years. I hated it. You know, I hated going to work. I was late every day. I really just really didn't give a fuck. It was really a lot of motivation for me to start shooting freelance and just develop more of an entrepreneurial spirit. So I quit, and that was probably the largest risk I think I've ever taken. Once I really started to put more effort toward my social media and just towards manifesting what I want and the kind of things I wanted to do and create, I think that's when I started to get visibility And people were like, okay, wait, who is this girl, like, who's, you know, creating all this? When I started capturing women of color, I was like, oh, like, this is actually a little bit more interesting than, you know, the old French girl. It was just more so just like really coming into who I am and my blackness and really embracing that. Women of color have been misrepresented in so many ways. I feel like I can show us in a different light than what society perceives us as or what the media puts out. I've definitely had a few experiences where I've been on set or I've been doing a job where someone may underestimate me because I am a Black photographer, or that I had to like kind of prove my creativity or prove my potential. You know, it kind of made me question myself. I think that the ability to see things in a different light and to find beauty in things that people may not always view as being beautiful I think that's what makes photographers photographers.
