A groundbreaking photo of Beyonce will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
BuzzFeed News reported that Tyler Mitchell, the then-23-year-old photographer personally selected by Beyonce to shoot her for the September 2018 issue of Vogue, announced the news on social media Tuesday.
"A year ago today we broke the flood gates open," Mitchell said on Instagram, according to The New York Times. "Since then it was important to spend the whole year running through them making sure every piece of the gate was knocked down. And now I'm glad to share this picture is being acquired into the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection."
However, museum spokeswoman Concetta Duncan said the piece would not be on permanent display, but she did confirm the acquisition to The New York Times.
"This acquisition will allow us to document a significant shift in the history of fashion photography through the depiction of a key figure in American culture," Leslie Ureña, the associate curator of photographs for the gallery, told BuzzFeed News in a statement.
The photograph, titled "See Your Halo," shows Beyonce posing in a shimmery, gold Valentino dress and a gold starburst Philip Treacy London headpiece. She leans on a white column, which has flowers on top, and gazes at the camera.
"Until there is a mosaic of perspectives coming from different ethnicities behind the lens, we will continue to have a narrow approach and view of what the world actually looks like," Beyonce said in an extended photo caption in the issue. "That is why I wanted to work with this brilliant 23-year-old photographer."
Mitchell graduated from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2017. He is from Marietta, Georgia. He's worked with rapper Kevin Abstract, Marc Jacobs and American Eagle.
"I depict black people and people of color in a really real and pure way," he told The Times in 2017. "There is an honest gaze to my photos."
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