Dana Scruggs has been having a good year. Since photographing Olympic track and field star Tori Bowie for the Body issue of ESPN the Magazine, Scruggs has shot for Nike, GQ, The New York Times and InStyle. Photos she conceived, art directed and shot for the spring/summer 2018 collection of Chromat—her third assignment for designer Becca McCharen-Tran’s line of swimsuits and bodywear—have been widely shared. “She seems to have taken New York by storm,” says Suzanne Donaldson, creative director at Nike.

Scruggs’ success didn’t come overnight. Since moving to New York City from Chicago six years ago, she has taken every opportunity to hone her style of graphic, sunlit compositions. “I focus more on shapes and bodies and skin. That’s what drives me,” she says. Clients seek her out when they want “dynamic” images, she says. “I’m able to get the images that I get because I view my work with the model as a collaboration. I don’t view them as a hanger.”

Rather than asking models to hold specific positions, Scruggs gives loose directions, asking them to imagine themselves as a leaf caught in a breeze or some other object in motion. By inviting her models to improvise, she says, “They feel part of the creative process and they’re willing to go the extra mile to give me different poses and expressions.”

Karen Frank, director of photography for ESPN the Magazine, says of Scruggs, “Her work is body-conscious, but it has that fashion edge.” Frank had bookmarked Scruggs’s website with the idea she could shoot for the annual Body issue if the right athlete came along. Bowie, a sprinter who also models, suited Scruggs’ skills.

Getting an assignment for the Body issue, a publication she had long aspired to shoot for, was “mind blowing,” Scruggs says. Frank says Scruggs “was pretty honest about the fact that she’s a new talent and it was a big shoot to take on.” Scruggs was the first black woman to photograph for the Body issue in its ten-year history. “I was not only representing myself, but I was also representing every black female photographer out there working right now and in the future,” she says. “I felt like if I screwed up, I could be denying someone else an opportunity.”

Working with ESPN editors, she helped conceptualize two shoots: One in a raw warehouse space, another on an outdoor set that used unfinished plywood for a stage and backdrop. On the day of the shoot, Bowie was recovering from a leg injury, and couldn’t perform athletic stunts. “We had to find a way to convey that she’s an elite runner without that,” Frank says. The finished package of images, showing Bowie reclining on the wooden stage and looking like a Greek statue, “plays off Dana’s strengths in finding interesting body poses,” Frank says. Scruggs says the shoot “was highly stressful but it was a great experience.”

From early in her career, Scruggs has challenged herself with new projects and, in the process, gained confidence in her skills and in what she wants to say in her work. When she moved to New York City to pursue fashion work she was primarily photographing white people, she says, “because I thought that would give me legitimacy.” Then she met Soukéna Roussi, the founder of GODS magazine, a platform for photographers, creatives and models of color whose talents were being underutilized by other magazines. Roussi urged Scruggs to photograph black subjects. Then Scruggs photographed model Adonis Bosso on assignment. “The first time I shot him, my work grew leaps and bounds,” she explains. Her photos show him making balletic, acrobatic moves. “There’s a fearfulness of black men in American society and globally. Capturing him in such a powerful and sensitive way honed my esthetic and made me realize that I wanted to change the narrative around black men through my work.”

Inspired by Roussi, Scruggs launched a crowdfunding campaign in 2014 to pay for the printing of SCRUGGS Magazine, a limited-edition publication showcasing her self-assigned photos of black men and her writings about beauty, the body and blackness.

Scruggs says, “I want people to understand that black people are powerful and have autonomy over our bodies, that our bodies and culture are not just for mass consumption and regurgitation.” More black celebrities are now featured in magazines, “but they’re mainly captured by white people through a white perspective,” she says. “When will our presence go beyond tokenism?” The people behind the camera, “doing styling, hair, makeup—that team is often mostly white.” She advocates to hire people of color for her production crews.

A year ago, Scruggs worried, “I can’t support myself financially” as a photographer. Then two things happened. A private commission last summer to shoot family portraits gave her the funds to buy a film camera, travel and shoot some tests. Then in January, she got “an amazing pep talk” from her friend Gioncarlo Valentine, a writer and photographer. “He told me there was no reason I couldn’t be shooting for big brands and big magazines.” Valentine encouraged her to find the decision-makers at the brands she wanted to shoot for, then update them constantly with new work. Scruggs realized that the photo editors and art directors who followed her on Instagram weren’t going to hire her unless she sought them out. She researched their emails, then every few weeks sent new work with a personalized note to them and to some contacts Valentine recommended.

Among the first clients to respond was The New York Times, though it would be August before she shot her first assignment for them. By then, her latest Chromat work had been circulating and the ESPN Body issue had been published, and Scruggs had an annotated spreadsheet of clients to whom she could share her latest assignments.

Since the publication of the Body issue, Scruggs has been featured on The Lit List, a juried selection of 30 under-the-radar photographers, and gotten calls from creatives who had never responded to her emails before. She laughs, and says, “A lot of people said, ‘I wish I’d gotten to you first.’ I say, ‘We can still work together.’’’

Still pushing herself, Scruggs recently shot portraits of architect Maya Lin for The New York Times. She plans to make a zine of street photos she shot in Paris on a medium-format camera. “My esthetic works well with sports and fitness,” she says, “but I also enjoy shooting fashion, portraits and photojournalism. Selling more prints and showing in galleries is next. I’m interested in longevity.”

Dana Scruggs’ Gear

Sony a7R III, Mamiya RB67.

“I’m very skincentric” and with the quality of images from the a7R III, she says, “not having to do a ton of retouching is great.”

Lights: Her favorite lighting technique, she says, is “finding the light.”

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