On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.
Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.
Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.
Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers.
Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).
Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?
Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?
Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?
Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?
Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].
Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.
Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.
Douglas: I’d buy that.
Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.
Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?
Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.
Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery
