Photographer is no one’s assistant
To make it as a woman of colour, she had to chip away at a concrete ceiling
Photographer Shaniqwa Jarvis has shot advertising campaigns for Supreme, Nike and Adidas. She’s shot portraits of Cardi B, Janelle Monáe and SZA. She’s held solo exhibitions in London and Tokyo. She’s capital-A accomplished.
But if her work is exhilarating, it is also tiring.
“Even still to this day there are certain people who hire me who have never hired a black woman before,” she said recently. “They think there are so many differences and they start talking to me and they’re like, oh my god, we’re so similar.”
This month, Jarvis released a self-titled book of her photographs, published by Baque Creative Press. She describes it as a greatest hits compilation, a record of her 20 years taking pictures in New York, Los Angeles and London.
Fashion remains a notoriously racist industry, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. It is particularly difficult for black women to succeed in commercial photography and fine art. So a recent conversation about Jarvis’s career doubled as a discussion of the obstacles she’s faced.
“I’ve always felt like I’m chipping away at a concrete ceiling with a plastic, non-biodegradable toothbrush,” she said. “I must be happy in it because I feel like I’m constantly chipping. Everything I do: OK, that’s another chip.”
She recalled a time when a professor asked one of her white classmates to take a highprofile brand assignment. He asked Jarvis to go as well — as an assistant.
“He was just like, ‘I think she’s more suited for the situation.’ And I was trying to figure it out, and I was like oh, better suited,” Jarvis said, gesturing toward her face.
That incident led to her departure from Parsons, in 1999. Two years later, she landed a photo editor job at Time Out, where she encountered a similar situation. A white colleague whose job she was taking over told her his salary and implored her not to let the company pay her any less. But even after she asked, she was not given the raise.
Understanding that she would not be able to move up at Time Out, Jarvis left in 2004 and began to work as a freelance photo editor for a range of publications, including Newsweek, Elle and InStyle.
Hoping to better establish her career as a photographer, she left New York for Los Angeles in 2007. But her fortunes didn’t change right away.
Jarvis worked odd jobs in pro- duction and styling, and found that things were even harder than they had been in New York. She moved again, to London, where she had a business meeting with an agent she’d never met before, who advised her to create a conceptual project, something she hadn’t done since Parsons.
“The meeting was very, very crap,” Jarvis recalled, laughing.
But Jarvis took the advice. She began to take pictures of young men in their homes, and turned their portraits into her first show, “This Charming Man.” The 2011exhibition was covered by street-style blogs like Hypebeast and HighSnobiety. And steadily, Jarvis began getting better work from more highprofile clients, including Stussy, Timberland, Siny, Vice, Riposte and the New York Times.
“I know what I want, and I don’t want to let people’s ignorance stop me from getting that,” she said. “I can never sit around and moan. As a black woman, I know that just out the gate. It’s not going to be the same for me. Knowing that, having that already in me, I just go for it.”