2022 Image Equity Fellow: Xavier Scott Marshall

Xavier Scott Marshall is one of 20 Fellows who were awarded the inaugural Image Equity Fellowship. Learn more here.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Cotton Club in Harlem hosted a dizzying array of iconic Black musicians and performers, but Black patrons were not permitted entry.

Xavier Scott Marshall was questioning that double standard—a space where a Black man in a suit could only be seen as the entertainment or “the help”—when he encountered a Harlem community program called We Do It Too, which teaches boys to wear suits, invites guest speakers and mentors, and generally invites boys to “come into their manhood in a confident way.”

As Marshall began photographing the boys in their suiting, he thought about James Van Der Zee’s classic Harlem portraiture and Ming Smith’s experimental approach to portraying musicians. He also thought about W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of “double-consciousness,” the sense, as Du Bois wrote in 1897, “of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” For these young boys from economically challenged backgrounds, would suiting be a form of “class armor”?

Would a suit equalize the playing field? Marshall used a 4x5 camera to make double exposures and processed the film by hand, allowing for subtle imperfections to remain part of the final images. “I wanted to glorify them while also paying homage to the past,” Marshall said of the Harlem boys. Instead of dancing for patrons, in these photographs, the boys are dancing for themselves.

Editorial statement by Aperture.

Explore the other 2022 Image Equity Fellows’ final projects and learn more about the Fellowship here.