I Think You Will Like This: Fabiola Jean-Louis (Patreon)

This last week over on Instagram, I've been sharing some accounts and creators who brighten up my feed with their creativity and just generally make the world a little better with their contributions. I'll doing a little cross-posting here, so you folks don't miss out. Check them out, give ‘em a follow, patronize their endeavors if it’s an option! 

Today: Fabiola Jean-Louis  
Instagram: @fabiolajeanlouis
Website: fabiolajeanlouis.com

The first time I saw a photo by Jean-Louis, it stopped me in my tracks.

The first thing you see is beauty. Beautiful models, beautiful dresses, beautiful settings, beautiful compositions, beautiful colors and lighting. 

Beautiful.

These photographs recreate the classic oil painting portraits of European nobility, which serve the dual purpose of documenting a “noteworthy” person’s appearance but also discreetly sharing select information about their role in society and personal history through symbolic items and background elements that only an educated eye would understand.

Jean-Louis’ portraits in her series “Rewriting History: A Black Ancestral Narrative” also tell a much deeper story, beyond their surface level beauty. 

Those fantastic historical gowns? They’re paper. Jean-Louis sculpts then by hand. The painterly backdrops? She painted them. The photographs themselves? She takes them. It is impressive enough to be a master in one field of art, but to be this skilled across so many and then to combine them all together into one cohesive final image? I want to say it’s remarkable, but that would be an understatement. 

The power behind her portraits is the stories they tell once you look a little closer. Most obviously, these are black women who are starring in a presentation almost exclusively reserved for wealthy white nobles from romanticized time periods. As she explains in her artist statement, “... history is not immutable. Like memory, it must be constantly recalled, re-evaluated and re-integrated into the present. Who we are is linked inextricably to what we remember, both individually and collectively.” Black history has actively been suppressed, misrepresented, and erased in our white supremacist society. Here, Jean-Louis takes black women and inserts them into an image of culture from which they have been starkly absent.

Jean-Louis fills each portrait with information about black history and the trauma that so much of it has been built upon from colonization. Her images can’t be looked at once and then moved on from, they require extended viewing to see the stories behind the surface, the ugliness embedded with the beauty.