Figure as Index

My photographic work is one continuous documentary project centering on the way objective visual documentation ostensibly formulates public perception that surround collective identities and historic record. Photography with its attendant history continues to be an evidential entity used to profile, surveil, speculate, classify and “understand” different subjectivities and communities. Although this is not exclusive to black subjectivities, that is where I begin and situate my focus. And so, as an image-maker, when I produce images, the legacies of documentary photography are on my mind and I think about how I can create an alternate past in order to imagine a different future of self— as it relates to a broader social communal context. The resulting fragment images highlight my close community of family of friends as we intimately create a document of self as we see fit. I use diptychs, polyptychs, text, and re-photography all as strategies to suggest an ellipsis to the photo as well as highlight its inherent artifice. I work in this way to also implicate viewers to slow read and consider the photographs as a breakaway from a reality as opposed to representation of it.