ARTS & CULTURE

BELLA ARTS & CULTURE

PLACES WITHOUT FACES ∙ WHY TEACHING BLACK LIVES MATTER MATTERS ∙ VITAL AGIBALOW

PLACES WITHOUT FACES

By Vanessa Coppes Photography by Andrew Werner

Photography is the art of capturing light with a camera to create an image. It can vary depending on what the photographer is trying to achieve. For example, documentary and news photographers capture images for the purpose of providing detailed account of actual events, while hobbyist photographers aim to capture life moments with their families and friends.

Andrew Werner is a New York-based photographer whose unique approach to style and innovative vision have afforded him a versatile career. With work spanning the fashion, event, and corporate spaces, his photographs have been featured in multiple national and international publications, including Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Vogue, and Town & Country.

But what happens when your world is tilted on its axis abruptly? Shelter-inplace orders and quarantine are the new normal. Events you were supposed to capture can be no more. You’re left with so many difference spaces, and there you are, just you and your art form.

I took notice of Andrew’s work on social media. Our ever-buzzing city had come to a screeching halt, yet I was able to also see the beauty in the spaces he was capturing. As Andrew so eloquently expresses, his Places Without Faces series was inspired by people, humanity, and connection, and what it is to be in a moment without it.

It’s so mind-blowing to see Manhattan’s biggest landmarks and iconic spaces devoid of human activity, conversations, glances, laughs, and engagement. It’s something Andrew said he felt compelled to document. This series invites the viewer to thoughtfully pause just as our great city had.

How did you get your start in photography? I’ve been behind the lens of my camera for as long as I can remember. My passion for photography stems from my love of people—being connected to their lives and their stories, even if for a brief moment. I initially entered the University at Buffalo with the intention to study musical theater but switched my focus to communications and photojournalism when I realized that this medium could allow my inner director, storyteller, and anthropologist to mesh together to capture the finite moments of the human experience. I remember shooting everything from theatre headshots, sports, and Greek life to student politics.

After graduating, I began photographing New York City’s notorious nightlife— this was the start of my career. I stayed out at all hours working for club promoters, using my pointand-shoot to capture the lavish parties and the bold personalities. I expanded to Manhattan’s society events, red carpets, charity galas, and weddings. I’ve always loved the city’s contrast and spontaneity.

Over the years, I’ve been able to refine the narratives that inspire me, and found my love for photographing fashion, beauty, interior design, jewelry, and architecture. While my subject matter has varied over the years, people have always provided the common thread— relationships, society, and the environments in which we experience key life moments.

What is your favorite part about photography? What is the best part your job? My favorite part about photography is the moment when my finger clicks the shutter—a single still frame, that brief moment that can bring you out of your own reality, allowing you to reach out and connect to another time, another place, another person’s experience. I love that I get to interact with such a diverse set of people, and it allows me to catch a glimpse of their experience.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I can give anyone is to follow your own dreams…chase after them with unrelenting passion and discipline. Put honest action behind your goals. There inevitably will be moments where you will doubt yourself or feel that the path you’ve chosen is too hard, but that is exactly when you need to persevere to turn your dream into a reality.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about what you do? The biggest misconception about what I do is that it’s just a matter of clicking a shutter, and boom—a great image is created. It doesn’t happen like that. You have to spend years training your eye to recognize the serendipity in a normal moment. You have to align your sight to capture the essence of the characters or environment in your story and then wait for that perfect pause—that in-between where it all comes together. That congruence of events could take a few seconds, or it can take a few hours or a few days. The ability to notice and capture is everything. That’s where the beauty is.

What do you hope your scope of work accomplishes throughout your lifetime? I hope my work inspires people to be more present in their everyday life and to see beauty everywhere, even in the mundane. There is so much beauty in the world that passes us by when we are hampered by time, anxiety, or the laundry list of things that cause us to zone out and disengage. If my images are able to help you shake off the stress and reconnect even for a moment, that may inspire you to engage in the rest of your day— and what a positive impact that can make on your life and for others!

Photography has the power to wake up your emotions, memories, and senses, and can bring you back to an exact moment in time—your first concert at an iconic venue, the feeling of walking through the cobblestone streets in the Meatpacking District, window shopping down 5th Avenue, your first Broadway show—these moments are made immortal with an image. My hope is that my work reminds the viewer that humanity is beautiful—that life is beautiful.

How do you define beauty? I am optimistic but also keenly aware that moments are fleeting, and that is why I try to find the beauty in every environment or circumstance. I look for the beauty in moments overlooked— there is power in that; beauty is that which is finite. The process of capturing Places Without Faces presented an opportunity for me to show the world what I found beautiful during a time when the absence of New York's heartbeat— its people—was hidden from view.

WHY TEACHING

MATTERS

BY VANESSA COPPES

Some content is adapted from Why Teaching Black Lives Matter Matters | Part I, by Jamilah Pitts, with permission of Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center - https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/summer-2017/why-teaching-black-lives-matter-matters-part-i

I

n September of 2019, after a full day of shows during New York Fashion Week, BELLA team members Jessica G. Cirz + Cheryl Dantoni Devine and I saved ourselves from the rain—and hunger—by spilling into a Chinese restaurant in NYC.

At the table next to us, I overheard two young photographers talking about the Fashion Week hustle, going from show to show. I smiled to myself because I know it all too well. When my food came, one of them looked over and said how good my plate looked. I took the opportunity to share my food with both of them and talk.

We ended up chatting up a storm about fashion, BELLA, and life in the city. We exchanged information. I kept in touch with one of them— Brandon Parker, a media student.

Scrolling through Instagram, his photography brought me to tears. Given everything going on in our city, I was reminded me of the beautiful moment we shared over something we both love: eggplants + fashion.

His work has evolved tremendously since then. Understandably so—he’s a Black man. I reached out to him to share his work in this issue. More importantly, I wanted to delve into why as content creators, we have the civic responsibility to learn and teach the basic history and tenets of this movement for racial justice. Brandon’s work matters. His life matters.

We have all had either direct or mediated exposure to Black Lives Matter (BLM). We should know the basic facts about the movement’s central beliefs and practices. As a communicator and truth-seeker, I can acknowledge how the threat of justice in one community is, to borrow from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a threat to justice in every community. We have a civic responsibility to be educated about Black Lives Matter and, as we learn, we must inform.

THE BEGINNING AND THE HASHTAG

The Black Lives Matter movement began with a commitment to end police brutality and state-sanctioned violence and injustice against Black people. It is also dedicated to affirming Black people’s “contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression,” according to its founders.

The movement was started by three Black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—following the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida man who had shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, the preceding year.

Garza took to social media the night of that acquittal, stating in part, “Black people, I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” A year later, Michael Brown, another unarmed Black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri; the officer was not indicted. Since the Ferguson action in 2014, BLM has taken shape as a multi-chapter national organization; 37 chapters currently operate in the United States, and one in Canada. Many BLM chapters and other organizations that embrace the movement mobilize people to demonstrate in communities where police shootings have occurred and to convene at large gatherings—such as political rallies—to bring awareness to police brutality. The website of the original group, BlackLivesMatter. com, also lists other types of local and national events, such as teach-ins, panels, and Twitter chats, and encourages organizers to submit their own events.

In an October 2016 interview with TEDWomen, Cullors explained what the movement means to her:

“Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to a reimagined world where Black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us,” she said. “I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of the questions, as a child, I had was why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why.”

MYTHS AND CRITICISMS

People who don’t follow Black Lives Matter usually become aware of the movement when news sites report on BLM actions or protests. What many people don’t realize is that the leadership also embraces policy change and legislation as necessary elements to end oppression of Black people, and that the work and the leadership are not limited to the Black Lives Matter network.

One common misconception about the BLM movement is that it is leaderless. But there isn’t one leader; there are many. “BLM is composed of many local leaders and many local organizations including Black Youth Project 100, the Dream Defenders, the Organization for Black Struggle, Hands Up United, Millennial Activists United, and the Black Lives Matter national network,” organizers explain on the website. “We demonstrate through this model that the movement is bigger than any one person.”

Another misconception is that the movement is solely a mechanism for protest. In fact, the many people and organizations with agendas and goals that overlap and align with BLM have produced detailed policy demands and proposals for institutional reforms. Campaign Zero, for example, outlines a list of policy proposals largely focused on ending police brutality. It is a strategy for addressing one of the most visible, damaging, and deadly symptoms of systemic racism. The Movement for Black Lives, a collective of more than 50 organizations, advances a platform covering six areas of domestic-policy reform, including economic justice, investment in equitable education, and health care instead of criminalization and incarceration.

Many people, however, view the BLM movement as violent, seeking to “sow a racial divide” and intent on interrupting the work of police officers commissioned to protect and serve the public. Another common criticism of the movement is that it should be more like the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which is praised today as a seemingly perfect, orchestrated and acceptable movement. Some critics who prefer the style and tactics of that movement find it difficult to imagine that the BLM movement might actually be an extension of the work that was done in the 1950s and ’60s.

Perhaps the gravest criticism and misunderstanding of the BLM movement stems from a failure to acknowledge the conditions that created the resistance. Without an understanding of the everpresent effects of slavery and the systems that have been built to protect and preserve the devaluing and oppression of Black bodies, BLM—and any other movement for rights concerning people of color in this country—will never be understood.

The strategies and tactics of social movements are rooted in their times, so it is no coincidence that the leadership of this generation looks different and is carried out differently from the civil rights era. BLM activism boasts a great range of diversity that includes Christians, Muslims, atheists, and people of all religious and nonreligious beliefs. There are no rules that will indirectly or directly keep certain groups from participating in this movement. Additionally, the use of technology, particularly social media, has equipped the BLM movement with capabilities that allow “regular” people to be “citizen journalists.” #BlackLivesMatter has become a tool used for mobilization.

This movement for rights and humanity is growing by the day and is bolstered by the very technology young people are using. Our children need to know the facts about BLM’s role in this historical moment and how it connects with a history of social change.

BUT DON’T “ALL LIVES MATTER”?

Perhaps the most common criticism leveled against the Black Lives Matter movement is that the movement is racist because it focuses on Black people. One way to counter this notion is to point out that all lives cannot matter if Black lives do not, and to educate critics about the conditions that ignited the resistance.

All lives are connected. All oppression—including that of LGBT individuals, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, women, people living in poverty and people with disabilities—negatively affects all lives. And although the BLM movement focuses on the oppression of Black people, its mission is intersectional and invested in liberation for all.

VITAL AGIBALOW

PHOTOGRAPHER

By Katya Bychkova

Flipping through the pages of BELLA, you have definitely seen some of Vital Agibalow’s stunning work. A world-renowned fashion, beauty, and celebrity photographer, Agibalow has worked with many frontrunners of the industry, including the late Karl Lagerfeld, Stuart Weitzman, Diane von Fürstenberg, and Priyanka Chopra, among others.

I have been following Vital’s career since 2008, when he had just signed a contract with HENSEL, a world leader in studio lighting equipment. Since then, his work has been featured in countless publications and his artistry has reached hundreds of thousands of eyeballs around the world.

Despite his success, Vital is extremely down to earth. Whether he is shooting backstage at New York Fashion Week among the industry's finest or helping out an up-and-coming blogger with his wisdom and experience, the photographer’s charming smile exudes the confidence and joy of a man who genuinely enjoys what he’s doing.

In return, Vital’s jubilant and calm attitude makes his photo shoots one of a kind. He is famous for his therapeutically relaxed approach when it comes to working on set with huge names. “The main point is to make everyone feel at home," he explains.

Even supermodels like Adriana Lima and Alessandra Ambrosio seem to look more beautiful and unguarded in Agibalow’s portraits. “What I really enjoy in life is capturing the beauty of the subject in front of me,” Vital says. It is the enthusiastic yet composed perspective he embodies on his sets that differentiates the purity of his work from others.

Vital likes to keep busy, but he makes sure to invest some of his time in a vast array of charitable causes. His latest project, an art exhibit designed to educate Hamptonites about sustainability, brought him an enormous amount of satisfaction, he explains, that can only compare to his previous exhibit dedicated to New York Fashion Week.

With his unmatched work ethic and emotional support, Vital deserves the recognition he receives from his peers and partners in the industry. When you see his name printed in your favorite magazine from here on out, you will be familiar with the face behind the lens.

VITALphoto