The Enchanting World of Nadine Ijewere

Last month, Nadine Ijewere released her first book, Our Own Selves, documenting her work as a preeminent fashion photographer whose Nigerian and Jamaican background has helped to define her space in an industry rife with elitism and at odds with diversity. Our Own Selves features an interview with Ijewere by Lynette Nylander, the executive editorial director at Dazed, who also authored the book's introduction. Ijewere's photographs are dreamt up from the imagination of someone who started at the margins of fashion and mainstream culture, a background whose charm and subversion finally revolutionalized the traditional concept of "style" on the largest stage when, after a hundred and twenty-five years, Ijewere was the first woman of color to shoot a cover of Vogue. Her monograph, which holds over a hundred and sixty photographs, is a fierce celebration of Black and brown people participating in high fashion fantasies.

For Ijewere, the book, and all the work it comprises, is rooted in the sense of disillusion that shaped her relationship with fashion photography as she grew up. While she studied photography throughout school, it was years before she would consider it as a career, asking herself, "I'm just going to take photographs of people who look like me and question why there's only one type of beauty?" The longstanding issues in the industry at the time were obvious. "I was sick of the stereotypes. In an editorial of Black women you’d see, there'd always be references to animal prints or animals. The same for Asian women. It was this connotation of being obedient."

Her work often exhibits no traceable reference, only taking inspiration from the joy and complexities in the lives of her subjects. In "Que Onda?," a Garage Magazine shoot from 2020, Ijewere convinces us that a playful daydream in Tlayacapan in which we wear head-to-toe Gucci to celebrate our grandmother's birthday is highly probable. Her vision, dominated by a sense of community, marked by a tendency to elevate and equalize, devours the environment. In "Good Me," a 2019 campaign for Nina Ricci, rosy-faced models lay on top of each other, lacing their bodies and arms as if using each other as props, their garments, among them saturated ball gowns, offering a way of life. Meanwhile, "The Cuba Project" features men in tuxedos sun-washed on the beach, latticed together with giant palm leaves, and twinning models in crochet dresses, who, like those in "Good Me," pose as one figure. Her images are hyperreal. Approaching paradise in "Material Values," models in sweeping tiered dresses pose with surfboards, lay peacefully, delicately, in crystal-clear water, and balance on tree trunks over emerald-green lakes.

Ijewere's undeniable knack for crafting stories out of the material she's given has afforded her the great opportunity to bring the fine impracticalities of high fashion into people’s everyday. However, her work grew out of her adoration for her own heritage, which she displayed in "Tallawah," a personal project presented in 2020 in collaboration with hairstylist Jawara Wauchope that showcases Jamaican women's relationship with their hair, something of an artform. Recalling her inspiration for the shoot, she said, "Growing up through the media, I would always come across negative connotations regarding Jamaican women in particular, and I wanted to go against that because it isn't true at all, especially with the women I grew up around." Ijewere is sparse in offering up personal projects, the required passion, time, and resources only very rarely all coming together. But it is that passion that forges her style and, to a larger extent, her character.

Our Own Selves is out now.