There are multiple shoutouts when you speak about your work. Yet what I found interesting is that none of the names you mention — Sontag, Baldwin, Debord — are photographers or image-makers. Is it an active choice to pull inspiration and references outside of the visual word? How does that open up avenues in your practice?
I could probably name 30 photographers off the top of my head that have influenced me, and I'll get excited while doing it, but that doesn't mean that I look to them for inspiration on project works. Most of my references are literary because my process comes from a literary space — philosophy, anthropology, and a little bit of fiction as well.
I'm really big on Russian 19th-century literature, and I've been reading philosophy since I was a kid. My grandmother would read me the Iliad and Odyssey, all those Greek and African myths, about the French Revolution, you name it — and I would swallow it as if it was fiction, only to be told that it all had actually happened, that what we were reading was history.
When you look at an artist like Baldwin or Sontag, these people have left behind a Codex as to how to unlock society. It’s coming back to the idea about how to understand contemporary society, taking something that already exists and just changing it by 3% and thereby turning it into something completely different; it’s directly connected to sampling, which correlates to what Virgil Abloh did with Nike, what Duchamp did to art. It’s an interesting avenue, where the whole power sits in the references; the same could be applied to fashion — it’s not about who has access to the finest fabrics, but who has access to the finest books. It all boils down to those who fucking read.
To me, the game is about figuring out — through text, through image research, or through a combination of things — where and how you fit in.
Through this major project of yours, have you been able to discover where you fit in?
I’ve discovered how deeply I care about humanity and how I care about the whole of it more so than the micro or the exclusive. I am interested in the spectrum of society, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and through the camera, I can empathize and relate to it all. In my formative years, I thought that I didn’t fit anywhere, that I was an anomaly in a sea of normalcy. Today I recognize this as a positive, but it certainly did not feel this way in the beginning.
My experience as an at-risk youth in New York City, whisked away from my family made me think I wasn’t loved, wasn’t wanted. It took living on four different continents, falling in love, falling out of love, immigration — all of the substantial experiences I encountered over the years documented in this book to realize that all the love I ever needed was provided — it was in me and always around me, I just needed to open my eyes.
My father never had the opportunity to leave New York unless it was in chains, my mother and grandmother never had moments of respite in their lives, and in my grandmother's case, she never will. They were born into an unfortunate cycle of government-sanctioned domestic terrorism. This work revealed to me that I am the hope of my family, I embody the wishes of my ancestors for us to be more than the cards we have been dealt.
Perhaps the biggest discovery for me, is that I will never stop making this work — it is what liberated me and gave me my mission — to witness humanity in its entirety, telling not only my story, my mythology, but those of my family, and others who trust me with theirs. Whether my friends or family, refugees, my Muslim brothers and sisters, and others I’ve crossed my path with. I saw them and their stories as important, and integral to what will be the history of our time. I’ll honor them today and tomorrow, and after the day I’m gone.
