Mix master
Photographer Alexi Lubomirski tells us what inspired his new book, Diverse Beauty, which features Lupita Nyong’o.
“SHE SAID: ‘PLEASE DON’T LIGHTEN MY SKIN’”
“I was shooting Lupita Nyong’o and she is this stunning, richly dark, beautiful African woman, and she said to me the first time we shot: ‘Listen, please don’t lighten my skin because I’ve had people do that before.’ Well, I didn’t know that happened, so I started going through my archives and looking at pictures I’d taken and seeing what had been done after I’d handed them to clients and I realised that they had lightened darker girls’ skin.
“I loved the fact that Lupita was this beautiful, proud black woman who didn’t have straightened hair and wasn’t trying to lighten her skin. Everything about her she was proud of and she owned. She made me think how I so rarely get to shoot beautifully dark women whether they’re African, Latino, Indian or Asian or whatever, because I always have this buffer. When I would offer my list of say 10 girls for a shoot, the first girls that would get knocked were always the African girls, and the comments were: ‘Oh, we love her but …’ And there was always a ‘but’. Then the Asian girls would get knocked off the list, then the Latino girls, etc, and you were always left with the top five models in the world who were either blonde or brown-haired Caucasian girls.
“So I wanted to do a book that was basically anything that was on that list where they said: ‘we love her but … she’s too freckly, her hair is too crazy, she’s too dark, too ginger …’ whatever. I wanted to celebrate those ‘toos’.
“In Diverse Beauty I want to show beautiful aspirational fashion images using a much more diverse beauty look than we usually see in magazines. Beauty is not a range from one to three, it’s a range from one to 50, and I think the more people see images with a vast array of people in them the more it will just become the norm. “To me, beauty is more than what’s on the surface, it’s mostly what’s inside. My perfect example is my wife. I think she’s beautiful, but her real beauty is when she smiles; it’s her inner beauty and confidence because she owns everything about her. It’s being content with what you have and just letting that shine through and being strong and proud. That’s what beauty is.” Diverse Beauty by Alexi Lubomirski (Damiani editore, $70) is out late October. All proceeds from sales go to the charity Concern Worldwide.