Makers & Dreamers | Antwaun Sargent

For a really long time, art history or art had told one story, and that was by design. One of the things that I'm trying to do is kind of fill some of those gaps. My name is Antoine Sargent. I'm a writer living in New York, and I just released a book called The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion. I wrote The New Black Vanguard because I was looking around and thinking about what was missing in photography, what was missing in our ideas around what desire looks like, what beauty looks like, what Blackness is in the space of a photograph. And I just found these young photographers around the world creating by their own standards and by their own definitions. The New Black Vanguard would not be possible without the internet. Most of these image makers came of age on the internet and largely make images for digital consumption. The internet has allowed them a way to control their own narratives, to create the images that they want to see in the world. People were like running up and crying and saying, you know, I feel really represented, I feel really seen. And, you know, and for a second it made me, you know, a little sad that like it took until 2019 for someone to have that type of response. To their culture, to things in our society. But in other ways, it made me extremely optimistic that I could create a space that was safe for people to truly kind of see themselves. In 2020 and beyond, I'm just hoping to sit with more artists and to understand their process and what it says about who we are. I'm going to continue doing the work that I've been doing because I find it to be extremely important. I really do believe that artists are working through some of the most complicated questions that our societies face, and I think that's endlessly fascinating.