AGE: 24
BASED IN: Los Angeles
NOMINATED BY: Tyler Mitchell
From questions of masculinity, sexuality, and religion, to reframing notions of dress, play, and performance, my visual language displays people who look and love like myself in all of their power and beauty, while promoting their freedom through finely crafted imagery.
Within the last year or so, I discovered that a longing for freedom is what had been the driving force for my lens since the time I started making photographs. Today, here in 2024, I am conscious of the difference and power that lies in requiring something as opposed to yearning for it. For me, crafting images is rooted in a demand as opposed to an ask. Personally, in 2024, making photographs means making the things that are in alignment with my power, my joy, my freedom… all that good stuff that makes life worth living—making those things the current location as opposed to a destination I hope to arrive at some point.
I’ve been obsessed with reading stageplays recently: The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney, The Blacks by Jean Genet, my favorite has been If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka by Tori Sampson. I can definitely see theatricality and performance making themselves more noticeable in my work and I think that is tied to the freedom that lives on stage. I find myself drawn to theater works because there are honestly no rules. People put whatever they want on a stage and say whatever they want to say in scripts, the name of the game is being as bold and vulnerable and free as you can be. I’m actively trying to infuse that into my work and craft artworks that are safe to be all they want to be.
