ongoing photo series

SIGNIFY is a series of staged portraits photographed with a focus on hands, to depict communicative and performative gestures associated with Black cultural identity. The individuals who posed for this project are a mix of people who I’ve known my entire life to mutual friends I met for the first time and overlaps in between. To deepen my exploration of the body’s ability to hold onto culture, I made the images in Alabama, Georgia and California to mirror migration patterns of Black people in the 20th century. This work drew inspiration from personal recollections, Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou, George Tillman Jr.’s, Soul Food, and the everyday lives of working class black people.