Tyler Mitchell was only 23 when he was invited to photograph Beyoncé for American Vogue’s September 2018 issue. In one of the two covers, she smoulders at the camera, wearing barely-there makeup and balancing a halo of colourful flowers on her head. In the other, she stands outside in an Alexander McQueen tiered dress with pan-African coloured lace, lifting white material above her natural braided hair. There is a raw beauty to both, casting the almost superhuman pop star in an unusually intimate light. But that wasn’t the only noteworthy thing about the pictures: Mitchell had made history, as the first African American photographer to shoot a Vogue cover. A few months later, Nadine Ijewere became the first black woman to reach a similar milestone, when she shot the singer Dua Lipa in a Gucci gown for the January 2019 issue of Edward Enninful’s British Vogue. Both covers were widely celebrated as landmark moments, but Mitchell is quick to level an awkward question at the media gatekeepers: “ Why did it happen so late ? If it were up to me, it would have happened earlier,” he tells me on the phone from New York. Model Seashell Coker photographed […]

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