LIGHTING THE WAY:
“We don’t even know that we can approach a commercial studio and say, ‘Here’s my portfolio, here’s the work I do. Do you deem it good enough to be in front of your clients?’ And because I did that, they were like, ‘Absolutely.’ And the thing is, they’ve been looking for my type of voice, right? Not even just the Black voice, but they’ve been looking for a voice that’s not theirs. Right? Because oftentimes, in this very specific industry, in commercial photography, you get a lot of same approach. And the same lighting techniques and the same style in terms of how to light Black skin or for any person of color. Which is a different approach, right? Different than, say, a Black photographer coming in and saying, ‘OK, this is how I would light myself, this is how I would light my mother, my father, my cousins.’ And then they see that and they’re like, ‘Whoa, this is completely different.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, well, this is my experience.’ I’ve experienced not being lit properly, not being color corrected properly, given this orange sheen on my skin, or being the brightest thing in the room. I have darker skin. So you’re going to light me some kind of crazy way while everyone else has this beautiful, nuanced lighting. You have to figure out how to walk that nuance into your art and into your medium, which takes more time to learn the discipline. But that helps us stand apart from everybody else. Just the most basic differences that I seem to face when coming into a room as a Black photographer come from the same differences I face just being a Black man. That, ‘Oh, his work can’t quite be that good.’ But then when it is that good, it stands out, because they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I didn’t know that you create something like that.’ Yeah, well, you give us opportunity, we can do a lot of things.”