Equality: Portraits of a Young Black Man
Joshua impressed me immensely with his poise and composure and his portrait session came together with an equal ease and grace. I didn’t know what he would be bringing for wardrobe and had only suggested he wear what he felt revealed something about his core being or values. So when he showed up all in black with the word “Equality” in white lettering across his chest, I thought yes, and thank you, too, for underscoring an issue that deserves unremitting advocacy and action. For too many people, African Americans in particular, social and political equality and the freedoms implied have still to be gained on so many counts. The continual game of one upping others is all well and good and healthy even, when nobody gets hurt, but when it descends to crippling disregard and malice? All of us who want a decent society and thriving culture suffer.
Within a month or so he would be off to basic training, putting aside for now his degree pursuits. I don’t know what future he imagines for himself, but his seriousness and quiet calm, his evident sense of responsibility, ambition, and courteous manners make him striking and memorable, to my mind. I tried to bring that strength of his out by embedding him with the flora all around. I draw inspiration from the singular power and presence of nature, and see people as forces of nature as much as of society. We are all shaped by our surroundings as we shape them, and kin to every other living thing, like it or not.
He was good enough to let me dress him, too, in some old velvet for a look that reminds me of the bedouins of North Africa and the Middle East, whose lives have an elemental, romantic allure for all their hardships. Youth is a time of story building and great expectations. I wish this young man all the luck in the world.
Photos shot on a Nikon D750 outdoors and in studio with a soft lighter and Interfit monolight.
Portraits of a Young Black Man
