And even though Beyonce is everything, this honor isn’t about her.
Photographer Tyler Mitchell will be added to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. The photo is one of several that Mitchell created with Beyoncé for American Vogue’s September issue for 2018, but that is when Tyler became a history maker, as the first African American to shoot a cover for the magazine. Mitchell, is also one of the youngest photographers to have shot a cover of Vogue at age 23.
https://twitter.com/Tyler_Mitchell_/status/1158728214900072449
Want to visit? National Portrait Gallery is at 8th and F Streets NW, Washington DC.
From CNN STYLE:
“When I first started, 21 years ago, I was told that it was hard for me to get onto covers of magazines because black people did not sell,” Beyoncé wrote in the extended captions that accompanied the imagery in the issue. “Clearly that has been proven a myth. Not only is an African American on the cover of the most important month for Vogue, this is the first ever Vogue cover shot by an African American photographer.”Around the time that the famous issue hit newsstands Mitchell said: “You’d imagine someone as famous as Beyoncé to be protective of her image, but she was really an open book — and that’s exactly what you want as a photographer.”
Susan Saunders 8/7/19
