This series of artwork is some that I am most proud of. I think what drives a lot of that emotion is how deeply healing it was to create. My relationship with my own skin has been full of so much strife and shame. The truth is, it affects me every single day of my life in a multitude of different ways, sometimes blatant, sometimes bleak. I have been taking these parts of my past, old memeories, more importantly the first iterations of racism I’ve experienced and I have been attempting to make peace with them and revert the sadness into something resembling a sort of counterweight for the soul. For many people of color there are feelings of constriction regarding the skin you have to live in every single day. It isn’t something you can just take off or change and it has such incredibly dire consequences in so many corners of our collective civilization. The first time I was called a n*gger I was in second grade walking back from the bathroom in the hallway of my school. That moment is burned, and I mean BURNED into my memory. The hate and joy circling simultaneously in the eyes of the white fifth grade boy as he spelled out each letter one by one N-I-G-G-E-R was terrifying to me even though I had no idea what the word meant. I can replay it in the most vivid and vibrant detail. That single moment has plagued me my entire life, it was the turning point, the place where all my doubts began and the discrepancies between me and normal people breached and broke the surface of my belonging. I was never the same after that and I use it as a marker in my mind of when the saturation of my skin started to cause me suffering. I chose to focus on old crayola crayons that used to say “flesh”. If that was the color of flesh or skin then what was on my body? The fact is, in many ways my skin has felt like a prison to me in many moments throughout my life. While making these pieces I wanted the photos of the children to feel like old prison portraits, cold and colorless. I then found the shade of crayon they used for flesh and also got the original font they used on crayola crayons in 1960’s and laid them over the photographs and photographed them again.
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Link to buy art in bio
It’s been exactly one year since I began this project and I’m finally close to finishing the last few pieces. From a body of work called “A Dozen Reasons Why ‘Beauty’ Is A Broken Word”
It started out as a study and fascination with 1960’s fashion and the indoctrination of commercialized food, old advertisements and assumed assimilation. Then somehow it transformed into this landscape of layers and yellow. I kept asking myself questions relating to desire and need versus destruction and wants. Advertising was and in some regards still a terribly sexist, racist, and unrealistic projection of identity especially on women and more importantly women of color. I don’t pretend to know what it was/is like for them but as a minority it is more of a general empathy towards those who have endured any excess of harm or harassment by virtue of how they came into this world, no choice in whether or not we are chastised or put into containers of oppression. With this series I am exploring the evolution of enticement and the ephemeral embodiment of daily beauty. The evocation of excess that extinguishes our common use expression that true beauty belonging on the inside. I wanted to be overtly metaphoric and take something inherently broken and imbue it with beauty, with gold. By mixing old fashion photos and old advertisements with different layers of graphic and photographic plates, the hope is to conjure a disturbance in our daily perception and acceptance of what is personified as perfect. The greatest gift lies within.
LIFE UPDATE! This fall I become an art teacher for the very first time 🤘🏾. So many emotions, so many things to say and so many feelings, mostly of the ecstatic variety. I’ll begin by just saying time on this planet is precious, a notion that many of us are already prescribed to; however amongst my parental responsibilities I’ve unearthed some new meaning and new found future in which I make space for so much more than I already assume so why not make it poignant, purposeful and full of parenthetical prose. I also get summers off so I can still shoot weddings and commercially. Win win!
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So here we go with chapter one of a new metamorphosis for my family and I, the most beautiful part of it all is that I am looking forward to how much these kids will alter my state of being and seeing the world as in turn I will try and show them how transformative their ideas and art can be in a world weary with wants.
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It also goes without saying but I’m very excited to be a positive black influence, in a field that is predominantly white, for the many different faces that will grace the space I am creating. Mr. Werths Wonderful World of Art coming soon ✌🏾❤️
@brandonwerth and I got to capture this Senior season together !! We’ve known Jules and her family since she was a toddler and her mom modeled for Hot Mama , now Evereve! It’s honor to be asked to capture these for her and it was so fun to see old friends again ❤️
It took me a week to sift through the overwhelming response to my last post. The amount of calls/texts/well wishes I received was UNREAL! Not really sure I’ve ever been more sure of anything in my entire life after the past week. 🖤🖤 So many thank you notes to send and messages to reply to. A few boxes started arriving from my Amazon wishlist and I simply cannot give a more heartfelt appreciation 😭😭 it all feels so surreal. So many people believing in me so now I have no choice but to believe in myself.
Shot this five years ago and I cannot believe how much time unravels. It has not been lost on me how incredibly lucky I have been to make photographs for a living. These projects for @artfullivingmag were especially sweet because they gave me so much freedom to conceptualize and do creative portraiture in pretty much any way I wanted, that sort of freedom is, well, freeing. I remember shooting this and not being so in tune with what the article was about at the time.
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Last weekend I was asked to photograph a gratitude meeting amongst some life long friends that became sober together through fellowship in St. Paul. The experience was absolutely life altering for me and gave me some substance for what sobriety looks like for many, most often it seems messy and lifelong but the successes seem more susceptible to suffer without a good sponsee and structure, I saw first hand how integral community is when breaking through bad habits. To find this magazine in a junk drawer in my basement this many years later made me sad that there are many areas of my life where something important to me gets shoved aside, I am grateful for these reminders, I am teary-eyed at the beauty I’ve witnessed, and I am so happy I could photograph @chefaz for this story on his failures and successes through sobriety. It’s a reminder that love can level any wall we’ve built around our hearts, god willing, it’s the one emotion that keeps us all here a little bit longer.
