beyonce sisters

Zerda Ağustos 09, 2022

beyonce sisters

Beyoncé’s Black Is King: Meet the African goddess at the center of the film - Vox.com
Meet Tyler Mitchell, the 25-year-old photographer who captured the real Beyonce - Telegraph.co.uk
Kelly Rowland opens up about being overshadowed by Beyoncé - New York Daily News

Beyoncé’s Black Is King: Meet the African goddess at the center of the film - Vox.com

Posted: 31 Jul 2020 01:20 PM PDT

"I am Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter," sings Beyoncé in "Mood 4 Eva," one of the tracks on her just-released visual album Black Is King. But that's not all she is: "I am the Nala, sister of Naruba, Osun, Queen Sheba, I am the mother."

Some of those names are self-explanatory. Beyoncé is Nala because she played Nala in last year's Lion King remake, for which Black Is King is a companion piece. But by calling out Osun, Beyoncé is once again positioning herself with the Yoruba deity Osun, or more commonly Oshun, and making explicit the visual parallels she draws between herself and Oshun throughout the film.

Oshun's not Beyoncé's first alter ego. Early in her solo career, Beyoncé introduced audiences to an identity she called Sasha Fierce, whom she described as "the fun, more sensual, more aggressive, more outspoken side and more glamorous side that comes out when I'm working and when I'm on the stage." After releasing an album titled I Am … Sasha Fierce in 2008, Beyoncé officially killed her alter ego off in 2010, saying, "I've grown, and now I'm able to merge the two."

But lately, Beyoncé has seemed interested in playing with a new and different persona. She incorporated Oshun imagery into her 2016 visual album Lemonade, and she has returned again and again to Oshun iconography in photo essays and videos since then.

Here's an overview of Beyoncé's Oshun connection and what makes Oshun such a powerful fit for Queen Bey.

Oshun is a goddess of love and beauty. Beyoncé's been identifying with her for years.

In the Yoruba cosmology of southwestern Nigeria and Benin, Oshun is the goddess, or orisha, of love, sensuality, and femininity. She is a river goddess, and one of her attributes is to bring forth sweet and fertile waters. Oshun is a mother: Her waters were central to the creation of humanity, and she looks after small children before they can speak. She's also associated with wealth and is said to love shiny things. She's often represented draped in yellow.

"Oshun exudes sensuality and all the qualities associated with fresh, flowing river water," wrote Oshun follower Valerie Mesa for Vice in 2018. "Her sparkling charisma can light up a room, and her lush womanly figure suggests fertility and eroticism. Oshun's favorite thing to eat is honey, and her contagious laugh can either put you under her spell or send shivers down your spine." And Oshun, who is said to be jealous, can be vengeful when she is crossed: "Oshun is as sweet as honey," Mesa writes, "but her honey can also turn sour."

Beyonce in — Beyoncé is reborn as Oshun in 2016's *Lemonade*.

In Lemonade (not so coincidentally, a form of sweet water), Beyoncé spends a long interlude submerged in a dreamlike state underwater. As "Hold Up" starts playing, she pushes open a set of doors and emerges in a great flood of water, dressed in a flowing yellow gown, and starts to wreak her vengeance on her cheating man. This moment, Africana studies professor Amy Yeboah told PBS in 2016, is "her emergence as an orisha." It's the point where Beyoncé is reborn as Oshun.

In 2017, Beyoncé returned to Oshun imagery in a photo essay announcing that she was pregnant with twins. The maternity announcement was laced with goddess imagery pulling from different religious traditions, so that at some points in the shoot, Beyoncé is recognizably the Virgin Mary, and in others, she's Venus. But she also drapes herself in yellow and submerges herself in sparkling water, becoming Oshun once again.

The 59th Annual Grammy Awards — Beyoncé channels various divinities, including Oshun, at the 2017 Grammys.

At the 2017 Grammys, Beyoncé continued to play with divine imagery from different traditions. In her performance of Lemonade's "Love Drought" and "Sandcastles," she donned a beaded gold gown and headdress and yellow silk, and as she posed with her dancers, she became variously Mary, Jesus, Venus, the Hindu goddess Kali, and — once again — Oshun.

In Black Is King, Beyoncé ditches any Western references. Black Is King is a love letter to the African diaspora, and while Beyoncé is, as always, representing herself as a goddess in this album, she's specifically and solely the Yoruba goddess Oshun. She wears Oshun's yellow and shining beads and cowrie shells; she emerges from the sweet water; she surrounds herself with flowers of fertility; she watches over children. She makes her connection to the goddess as explicit as possible: "I am Osun," she sings.

In associating herself with Oshun, Beyoncé is highlighting certain key parts of her image. She's always been an untouchable goddess, and she's always been sexy, but now she is maintaining that her beauty is divine and so is her motherhood, and that they are inextricably linked. She's connecting herself to a cosmology in which beauty and love and prosperity all come from the same source, and she's naming herself as that source.

And she is very firmly, pointedly saying that none of these wonderful things — love, beauty, divinity, prosperity — have to come from the West. They have a source in Africa. Throughout all of Black is King, Beyoncé is putting that source at the center of her work.

We always knew she was a goddess. Now she's telling us exactly which one she is.

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Meet Tyler Mitchell, the 25-year-old photographer who captured the real Beyonce - Telegraph.co.uk

Posted: 01 Aug 2020 12:00 AM PDT

Tyler Mitchell broke the glass ceiling at just 23. Only a year after graduating from film school, he became the first black photographer – as well as one of the youngest – to shoot the prestigious September cover for US Vogue. With the help of Vogue's creative team, Beyoncé picked him for the cover shoot (he was well known to her circle, having photographed her sister Solange). She was drawn to him, knowing what his hiring would mean historically – and in fact, the shoot became so famous that only a year later, one of the images was acquired by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

When Mitchell, now 25, met Beyoncé, he was surprised by her warmth. 'When she sat down for me, there was immediately the kind of comfort level you'd have with a friend,' he told Vogue at the time. 'You'd imagine someone as famous as Beyoncé to be protective of her image, but she was an open book – that's exactly what you want as a photographer.'

Mitchell's photographs and films, an exploration of black identity and beautifully curated works of art, have what insiders call a light-hearted, exuberant style – and what he calls a 'black visual utopia': 'My photographs visualise what joy could look like for black people, if we weren't denied certain freedoms historically.' This feeling of optimism informs his recent exhibition and book I Can Make You Feel Good, shown in Amsterdam at Foam last year and later at New York's International Center of Photography (the name comes from a Shalamar song he overheard on his way to discuss the exhibition).

As well as Vogue, he has produced work for several other high-fashion magazines, such as i-D and Dazed & Confused, and labels including Prada, Marc Jacobs and Givenchy. He takes inspiration from his personal experiences, but also from history, although he notes that he doesn't speak for his entire race. 'I don't pretend to be globally altruistic,' he says, acknowledging his middle-class upbringing. 'I am just coming from the vantage point of being a young, black man who grew up in the South, in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, and who moved to New York.'

Like most people his age, he grew up with social media as a huge part of his life (he has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and in the early days eschewed an agent for showcasing his work on the platform) and has translated this style into his photography. He hopes this allows his work to be seen more and talked about in a deeper, more critical way.

Most of all, he hopes that, in the age of Black Lives Matter, his pictures will challenge society to question the way black people are depicted – too often, he says, they are used in shoots because they are black, not because they are people: 'For so long, black people have been considered things,' he has said. 'The current question is for folks who are white in power in all industries, systems and governments worldwide to reconsider how they operate.'

However, he doesn't think his images have the power to give any answers. 'It's not like photographs talk at you, photographs don't even necessarily have any role in anything, it's only up to the viewer what role a photo has.' One just has to hope that that role is outlook-changing.

All American Family Portrait, 2018

Credit: Tyler Mitchell

'Tyra Mitchell is a friend of mine. She's also a photographer and we have very similar names, which is how we came to know each other. I was inspired by her and her journey with having twin girls at such a young age. The kids [Ava and Aurora] were about six months old and the parents [Tyra and her partner Naeem] in their early 20s. For the shoot, I went out to Howard Beach, an area in Queens, where there's a history of race riots. It was where a man named Michael Griffith was killed in the '80s in a racially charged murder. The area had a lot of Trump signs and American flags in people's yards. As black folks, the American flag isn't necessarily a welcome sign or a sign of democracy or freedom. It's a scary one. So I really felt compelled to make this image of a beautiful family unit in front of this tattered American flag.'

Still from Idyllic Space, 2019

Credit: Tyler Mitchell

'I just go back to thinking about lying on my mum's carpet in Georgia eating gummy bears when I see this image. It's recreating and plucking out a nostalgic moment from my past… Thinking about how that was a time when there wasn't much to worry about.'

Boys of Walthamstow, 2018

Credit: Tyler Mitchell

Vogue, September 2018 That historic cover

Tyler Mitchell photographed Beyoncé for the September issue Credit: Tyler Mitchell

Untitled (Toni), 2019 From a shoot for i-D's The Voice of a Generation issue, June 2019

Credit: Tyler Mitchell

I Can Make You Feel Good, by Tyler Mitchell (Prestel, £45), is out now

Kelly Rowland opens up about being overshadowed by Beyoncé - New York Daily News

Posted: 15 Jul 2020 12:00 AM PDT

"I would just torture myself in my head," Rowland continued. "Like, I can't wear this dress because they're going to say it's like B. Or, I can't have a song like that because it sounds too much like B...They're gonna compare anyways."