Joshua Renfroe's 'BEAU' Is a Portrait of Black Male Beauty

Brooklyn-based photographer and multidisciplinary artist Joshua Renfroe has released BEAU: The Black Male Mystique, a 288-page visual exploration of Black boyhood, manhood and beauty.

The title, drawn from the French word for “beautiful” or “handsome,” also references Renfroe’s upbringing in Tuskegee, Alabama. During his senior year of high school, he participated in the Orchid Club Beautillion, an African American coming-of-age tradition in which young men, known as Beaux, are formally introduced to their communities. That experience would later inform his approach to the book.

Through intimate portraiture, Renfroe challenges the narrow ways Black men are often represented, making room for tenderness, elegance and vulnerability alongside more familiar expressions of masculinity. Rather than defining what Black male beauty should look like, *BEAU* invites its subjects to shape that conversation themselves.

The project also looks to the past, particularly Frederick Douglass, who recognized photography’s potential to challenge racist stereotypes and reclaim control over Black representation. Douglass, one of the most photographed Americans of the 19th century, used portraiture to assert dignity and humanity at a time when those qualities were routinely denied to Black people.

Featuring 22 Black men across generations, including Moonlight actor and fellow Alabama native André Holland, the book connects that history of self-representation to contemporary Black culture. It includes a foreword by Douglass Morris, a descendant of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, with additional writing by Curtis Taylor Jr. and design by Fred Sands IV.

BEAU: The Black Male Mystique was released on October 23, 2026 and is now available online and globally.