Classic Movie Scenes Recast with Black Actresses

Via Anne Helen Petersen, this beautiful collection of photos, a collaboration between two Dakar-based photographers that features black women centered in movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, American Beauty, Thelma and Louise, etc. By far the most interesting dimension of these projects is how quickly they’re received as controversial:

[We] did hit some nerves, especially in the US: after one of my interviews was published on CNN.COM. We were taken aback by the racial dimension of some readers’ comment. To my great surprise, I realised that this series could be seen by some as a sort of “revenge” of black people against a too “white” Hollywood. The “race war” in the comments section was quite epic!

About the new Barneys campaign featuring transgender models, Karley Sciortino writes “We cannot be what we cannot see.” To me that sentence seems more relevant to people who still react wildly against difference, rather than to the huge number of people who are used to identifying with cultural figures that have never been “like them.” [Guardian]