Shaniqwa Jarvis Is No One’s Assistant

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. She is often confronted by industry peers who question whether she’s capable of doing what she does, who scrutinize her credentials, and wonder aloud whether she is suitable for the job and sometimes mistake her for the stylist when she shows up for shoots.

“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 both commercial photography and fine art. So a recent conversation about Jarvis’ 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.”

Raised in New York, Jarvis studied photography at Parsons, where she developed her ability to gain her subjects’ trust and the hallmarks of her style: intimate pictures, often shot from below, that project softness and warmth.

At the same time, she says she got a taste of the forces that would later work against her. She recalled a time when a professor asked one of her white classmates to take a high-profile 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, soon enough, 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 production 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. “It was one of those meetings where I think anyone else would have walked out being like, I’m going to move back home, and I’m going to work in a bar.”

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 2011 exhibition was covered by street-style blogs like Hypebeast and HighSnobiety. And steadily, Jarvis began getting better work from more high-profile clients, including Stussy, Timberland, Siny, Vice, Riposte and The New York Times.

Now that she is her own boss, her direct exposure to industry racism has lessened. But she still finds herself blinking twice at the things she hears in preproduction meetings, at the assumptions some clients make about her. Asked if she was worried about burnout, she explained her mindset.

“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.”