The Kamala Harris Vogue Cover is Nothing and Everything
How does what is essentially a bad picture cause so much uproar? Because both Vogue and Kamala Harris represent a greater story.
When Kamala Harris has officially sworn in as the first Black, Female Vice President, no one will care about this. Many Americans, Black Americans in particular, will be cheering her on and won’t remember that a week earlier, they were raging on Twitter about the quality of a cover image on a fashion magazine.
Yes, that fashion magazine is Vogue and the cover image is someone who will be seated next to arguably the most influential political figure in the world.
But it’s just a picture, right? So why the uproar?
If we look at this from its simplest form, it’s a creative problem. The Twitter-verse is up in arms because they don’t approve of the picture’s quality. More specifically, the negative reaction has been to the selection of the image as the cover, so really it’s a failure of taste or poor choice that lead to the firestorm.
What complicates the intrigue is that the photographer is Black. Tyler Mitchell, who shot Beyonce for Vogue in 2018, was tasked with capturing Harris. How can Black people complain when it’s one of our own who essentially created this mess?
