Growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, photographer Adrienne Raquel remembers the era of the video vixen well. Hip Hop honeys like Melyssa Ford, Karrine Steffans, Buffie the Body, Bria Myles, Gloria Velez, Esther Baxter, and Rosa Acosta were like lyrics of Wu Tang Clan’s “Ice Cream” come to life. Transforming eye candy into a fine art, each vixen possessed her own innate style and physicality, and became icons of femininity and stars in their own right.
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Raquel came of age at a time when analogue and digital technology first converged. “I grew up in a Black household where at every moment we were tapped into the culture,” she says. “Both of my parents loved music, film, and TV. I grew up feeding into all of it. My dad used to bring home magazines like Jet, Ebony, Vibe, XXL, and The Source. I would look through those magazines, tear out these amazing ads for Rocawear and Baby Phat, and scan them into our computer to create my own graphic art.”
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On the cusp of adolescence, Raquel watched music videos with older cousins, gazing upon the vixens in awe. “What drew me to them as a child and even now at 30, is that these women were crème de la crème, recognised as the celebrities in their own right,” she says, “I was an only child, super introverted, very shy, a late bloomer, and very sheltered. These women had confidence in their sensuality, a sense of power and allure that is something I always wanted to possess – whether growing up, as a teenager, or now as a young lady.”
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Although Raquel is a self-described “wallflower,” she’s readily in the mix photographing Travis Scott,Lil Nas X, Megan Thee Stallion, Selena Gomez, fashion, and beauty for T Magazine, Vanity Fair, CR Fashion Book, Dior, and Pat McGrath Labs. Recently featured in Antwaun Sargent’s landmark book inThe New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion (Aperture), Raquel now takes centre stage with ONYX, her first solo museum exhibition, on April 22 at Fotografiska New York.
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