NEW SLATE

Beauty is something I have yet to define for myself. The adjective has somewhat become a journey of exploration for me. As a young girl, I had always been fascinated by the ideals of beauty but never understood how my blackness, ( much less anyone else's ) fit in context to the word. A question that I felt deserved to be answered. Of course, I saw Black women depicted in various ways, but it was never in the ways a white woman had been depicted as beautiful. From Blonde hair to blue eyes, straight hair, and skinny thighs – no one I personally felt connected to embodied those traits. Leaving me yet again, confused about what Beauty is supposed to look like while black. When I came of age and wanted to mimic the women I knew embodied the ideals of beauty, oftentimes I had been chastised by my elders for being too promiscuous, to the point of not wanting to express my femininity. It was never fair to shield myself from the woman I wanted to become which led me to create a series based on my own ideas of black femininity. I chose the women of this series, simply based on the way I had seen them photographed previously via social media, only to notice that the commonality between them all had been their femininity being depicted by the gaze of a male, which posed a deeper question for me. What would the opinion of black women be if they were only photographed through the gaze of a woman? More specifically, a Black woman. Factoring in the hyper-sexualization of the male gaze, it only makes sense that the majority's opinion would slowly become the only opinion. Leaving that opinion to become reality to some, and a stereotype for others. My only intention moving forward was to create agency over my own body by finally representing black women in a way that not only highlighted their bodies but illustrated the grace and powerful

beings, I know them to be.