I wanted to create a project around black and brown folks and the relationship they have with their bodies. I know it’s a very personal subject but I thought I would start the conversation anyway, why; Well because I create a lot of work with a lot of people mainly undressed and most of my people think that a little radical or taboo, but it’s just body parts but I found that my people have varies issues when it comes to the body and how they see themselves or how others might see them. so I decided it was something that I wanted to talk about a little more.
It’s crazy that I never saw the body as a sexual thing, I wasn’t raised to see nakedness and sex the same way. My mother had two boys raised in a family of girls, so my mom didn’t really hide much, she thought if something happened to her she’d prefer us to be the people that looked after her, to which I understood as she had to nurse her grandparents when she was young. I also went to art galleries and museums with my tutor, so nakedness was just art. As a boy I was invisible to my mother’s friends as they got ready for a night out, so I saw bodies came in all shapes and sizes.
Thing is in my culture the body represents a lot of things, but to me it was the journey, most of the women around me would talk of which of there children gave them stretch marks, or the latest diet trend, but the ones that liked to eat loved their bodies the most, well sometimes, in Jamaica a larger woman feed you well, and were prized as the home makers. My granddad had this down to a science of what a woman was going to be like based on her complexion and body shape, and the part of the Caribbean she came from, everyone had an opinion.
Once I was close to puberty, that all changed, women in the family no longer saw me as innocent and with a change of voice and body features, I was now the enemy or that’s how it felt. My mother shamed me for my voice change, my smell and my appearance, at that age it felt like I had been cast aside. I didn’t fully understand what had happened but I did notice I had more attention from girls and men that like young boys that looked like me, but that’s a different topic, something that I understood later in life.
So the next time I explored nakedness in the context of art was at university, when I photographed my first naked person, I thought about all the poses I had seen in the museums I had visited, I did research, thought about the conversations I had heard and all the naked people I had seen before this moment. it was a little different back then because I had a full studio of lights to choose from, camera’s and lens and I shot on film and Polaroid, so things took a little longer and you didn’t know what you had until you developed the film in the darkroom. I didn’t know this person that well she was just another student from a different department. I wasn’t much of a talker back then, but to photograph someone naked you have to make them feel comfortable, you have to have a conversation. That conversation leads to the type of image you would eventually capture, then there’s viewing the body as a man, the male gaze, we don’t see the same way as women, I guess that’s a biological thing. So the conversation is the important bit, to show how that person wants to be seen.
I’ve shot hundreds of bodies since then, my journey with nakedness has been a journey about being seen. During this journey I realised, within my culture we had been mostly raised to be ashamed of our bodies and this was for many reasons, but the biggest was the male gaze and the lust that followed, I never really understood this, because I always saw the naked body as art, composition, light, shadows and angles and how you place that body in a space. My hero’s felt the same so whenever I saw nakedness, this is what I saw. Mapplethorpe made me see things a little different, he viewed/photographed naked black men, he oiled them, cropped them, focused on specific parts, he created both fear and fantasy, while at uni I despised him mainly because I was the only black student 1 out of 120 students covering three year groups and part timers (crazy I know) and he made me a fetish. My lecturer made him my topic of discussion but didn’t like how I portrayed him as exploitative. This is what came back to me whenever I saw pictures taken by some photographers of naked black and brown women, we were exotic, sensual, a tease, lustful, an experience. I talked with some of my female friends and they had different views but most was about how there bodies where spoken about as they grew up, developed, which created eating disorders, weight issues, skin colour issues so many ways to hate the body. Men and women elders could be abusive or the cause of some kind of sexual violence, and as a child you would normally be held accountable for what some adult or older person had done to you.
TO BE SEEN
was created due to my experiences and others, I don’t think men really talk about the abuses we suffer, it’s not that mainly, and who really cares when your male, so it was easier to start with start with a woman’s relationship with her body and then hopefully move onto the topic of men and some of there experiences.
Why would you let me shoot your images, after all I’m a man.
I am a man, a black man at that. I think that i’ve had many conversations with woman about there bodies, the bits they love and the bits they don’t. it would be easy for me to continue to work as an artist but I think as an artist I should not only tell my stories but help other to tell there’s. I guess a female photographer could shoot this project and i’m sure once I start someone will come forward to do the same, but it won’t be the same, but it will tell a similar story from an photographer with a female perspective. I just want to start the conversation and do my bit, I want to start the conversation, and see what happens.
How will this project work.
I’m gonna give more of a description in part two of what I'll expect and how we can shoot this project, and how I will use this work.
