Gray, 2019

My first portfolio, Gray, documents my coming of age as a biracial teenager in Kansas City. Growing up in a predominantly white, Midwestern community, I increasingly found myself bound to a feeling of grayness—confined to in-between. For me, photography has been a means to explore those clashing facets of my identity that evoke such feeling: my whiteness and blackness, my masculinity and safeguarded beliefs, my individuality and urban-life’s generalizations. Ultimately, my work seeks to find meaning in grayness.

Using portraiture, I capture my familial relationships and speak to their influence on my identity, be it as biracial or as a young man. Through these intimate moments I reject toxic conceptions of manhood that deem such acts effeminate. In doing so, I question masculinity altogether; from whom do I draw strength? Is welcomed intimacy an indulgence into my anatomical fate? My work revels in vulnerable aspects of the human condition that induce grayness, thus deriving value from in-between. Eventually, my work extends into the city where I dramatize banal urban-landscapes and push boundaries of value and aestheticism. My photographs convey the overarching sense of detachment that is caused by the grandiose of city-life. I explore the chasm between the intimacy amongst family and the loneliness beyond. Again, I wander between two spheres, seeking to retain individuality in a setting that commonly suppresses it. Treating photography as an intimate medium for introspection, I’ve been able to find myself amidst vast cities that are easy to become lost within.  When I create work, be it conceptual or reactionary, I’m not confined by a definitive goal of correctness. Rather I simply define moments how I see them. My work’s subjectivity is the beauty, for it breeds conflicting ideas and subsequent discourse. It’s through this I hope boundaries can be caressed; that fallacious walls can be overcome; that grayness can be made beautiful to inhabit.

Exhibited in “There’s More Than One Way Home,” The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, 2019