2022 Image Equity Fellow: Miranda Barnes

Miranda Barnes is one of 20 Fellows who were awarded the inaugural Image Equity Fellowship. Learn more here.

When Miranda Barnes graduated from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2018 with a degree in Humanities and Justice, she was unsure how photography would fit into her career plans. That year, she was commissioned for a New York Times story about Memphis for the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. 

“It gave me the confidence to pursue photography as something I could use my background for in a more visual sense,” says Barnes, a self-taught Caribbean American artist who grew up in Brooklyn. In the years since, she’s taken on a range of commercial and editorial work across the country, including for Nike, Apple, Vanity Fair, and TIME, developing an approach that draws from the visual language of street portraiture and environmental and vernacular photography. 

The intimate and vibrant work in her sub-series Labor Day Parade—which focuses on the West Indian Day carnival that takes place in Brooklyn every September—forms one part of a much longer-term project exploring celebration, community, coming-of-age, and Black subcultures across the country, including Cotillion and Debutante Balls.

For Barnes, who has been photographing the parade since she was a teenager, style is as much about individual expression as it is about community relations and history, which is why people, in celebration and communion, are always at the center of her work.

Editorial statement by Aperture.

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