In Our Skin
Visualizing Racism
This is an ongoing personal project
When I think of racism, I don’t think first about the injustice; I think about how it strikes my body. Racism knocks me outside of myself. Sometimes different versions of me rush forward to inhabit my corporeal self, giving me the strength to survive the psychic and physical onslaught. This is the feeling that I wanted to infuse the project with. As a photojournalist, documenting events is intrinsic to my work. However, documentary photography is too literal to get to the emotional, extrasensory experience that I think is necessary for these images. I encouraged my friends who were involved in the project to think about how racism makes them feel and to bring those feelings with them to the photo shoot. What I’m interested in are raw, emotive images that draw on symbolism and a disruption of realistic imagery. It is important to me to capture and render this viscerally, because I don’t believe that we can interpret racism entirely through our intellect alone.
We cannot escape racism any more than we can escape our skin. Post-racial America has been and will remain a myth. I’ll settle for a post-racist America, because in this moment we see that the distance we have traveled isn’t far enough. For this project, we took aim at a country that won’t recognize our humanity, or citizenship, or even our right to take umbrage. We insist that racism is the racist’s problem, that our own humanity is intact, and that the people who spew hate are the ones who have the greater problem.