John Edmonds

A very emotional evening of packing 💔 cc: @adultmagazine @snpsnpsnp @boygirl (at New Haven, Connecticut)

Stopped him to tell him I need his shirt in my life (at Delancey Street – Essex Street)

HOODS series gets a shout out on @thefader ✌🏿️

Regram @refashionafrica @vogueitalia 📕📓📖 #mood #voguetalents

Moist ☀️💦 (at New York, New York)

Front page of Huffington Post Arts & Culture @huffpost_arts

Journal

Regram @dynamicafrica Allowables by Nikki Giovanni

In order to see, you have to love. And in order to love you have to be moved to understand. There is no way around this. There is no way to make someone see you. But- there is room to open oneself up to be seen. Some only see parts and this is not only out of ignorance or lack of understanding but also refusal. The act of relating, of identifying, of relationships has become so abstract and obfuscated that we easily mistake pain for awkwardness or grief for anger. Our job as artists (and people) is to recognize when something provides us with a chance at understanding and compassion- when this opportunity presents itself, looking at us right in the face.

Kickin it w @jeromewharris in Shotgun (2014)- first video work

For the last few days I have been looking rigorously and thoroughly at my work and how it has developed over the last several years—trying to find the important connections and strings of what ties it altogether. I keep going back to these pictures from the HOODS series and thinking: what does it mean to turn your back on someone, or a world, that has continually turned its back on you? Love—unrequited love, especially—is a theme that continually finds its way back into my work. I think a recent development within my own practice is realizing how this feeling of unrequited love happens in life not only a personal level, but even more rampantly on a macro level—in mis-representations through the media, misappropriations and borrowings of cultures and in systems of (in)justice. Lately I have been finding myself more and more drawn to the feeling of a void in these pictures, even though there is always a human present. I see someone who is tired of performing—exhausted, unprotected and (seriously) tired of the bullshit.

Paris, Summer 2015- lots of work from last summer I need to revisit. I like this one.

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Jordan Raising His Hand With Bag (Encounter), 2015 I met Jordan Coley in the Bass Library at Yale. I told him he reminded me of a young Omar Epps (especially if you have ever seen JUICE—it’s a major movie from my childhood); it was mainly his haircut and his retro style. The first time we did a shoot, he wore this Jordan t-shirt and I found that to be ironic in the best way possible. I asked him to perform this gesture on his t-shirt and recorded this action over and over again. It was like magic; the chiaroscuro and the volume of light and shape. Color is a very important part of all my work. A friend pointed out to me in a studio visit that the color of this image is primarily red, green and black—the Pan-African flag colors. As someone who is fascinated with encounters, I wanted to restage our meeting and have the image look like a casual passing on the street. You can feel the weight of the Walgreens bag pulling him down, but he reaches up with such effortlessness and grace. (at New Haven, Connecticut)

I'm (super) human #bitmoji

It really is true that things are half of what they are and half of who is looking. I met a young man named DJ from Ghana while walking down the street this past fall and asked to photograph him. I often photograph people I do not know well because I feel this leaves more room for my imagination to roam and for natural chemistry to transpire in the encounter. The photographs that resulted from the shoot we did together were from the very end, when he was wrapping his face and head once more to brave the brisk New England air. I was captivated by the androgyny and beauty of his eyes—their shape, their femaleness—and how he was able to act as a chameleon, shifting and changing and becoming in those milliseconds between exposures. When I originally showed this series of photographs—a room of thirty-seven pictures with different fluctuations of his eyes and hands—I thought of the installation as a performance of a double consciousness, a term coined by W.E.B. Dubois. Yet, there is a third consciousness that comes when race also intersects with sexuality, gender, ethnicity and other parts of our selves that make up how expansive, how fluid we truly are in our inner lives. I am interested locating this space of multiplicity and the infinite that comes, ultimately, from a place of power and pleasure when moving my body throughout the world seeing and being seen. #thirdconsciousness