Hi Naima, how are you?
Hi Saam, it’s so nice to be connected.
What does the world around you look like right now?
I love this question. It’s a Sunday afternoon, I’m listening to Leo's Sunshipp after having a delicious and restful morning with my love. I woke up and started making pictures inspired by the light in our bedroom. We made breakfast together. I’m drinking a pot of genmaicha with rose. Right now, my world feels full of possibility. After a long dark spell, I feel encouraged to jump back into my projects again.
I read "Open Tabs Piece", about three times over, a beautiful work. As a writer, it excited me so much with its subtle experiment with word creation. How often do you find yourself living a normal day and wondering how regular action can turn into artwork?
The open tabs pieces are a way for me to keep records of what I’m looking at, what I’m searching for, what I’m seeking. When I’m feeling grounded and centered and open, every day is one where I see something that could lead to a work, an idea, a spark, a color story. But this winter transition is a hard one, and for the past couple of months, I’ve been focused on the pictures I make for other people. Today and the start of this year feels new in that way. This morning we played around with photographing an egg yolk as I was making pancakes. I’m feeling especially attuned to color. The Leo’s Sunshipp vinyl is the color of yolk. It’s gorgeous. And I’ve known it’s gorgeous for some time but today I really paid attention to it.
All that to say, I’ve been coming out of a deep fog and on the other side of it, every day is the beginning of a more intentional way of looking.
You recently shot your friend and collaborator Solange for Harper’s Bazaar in the monumental cover story she wrote in October, a beautiful and ethereal project. It seems that linear time was not an instrument in the creation of this piece—what conversations did the two of you have around the piece’s creation and its relationship with time?
Solange and I didn’t talk about her writing of this piece but we definitely created an environment that day where linear time was insignificant. What I appreciate about our collaboration was the time we took to experiment—she had one idea about the set design, we tried for a couple of hours to work with that idea but she ended up not feeling as connected to it. So we changed the plan, moved to a different area of the apartment, shifted the music, and kept the energy and process open enough for all of that to happen.
I wanted to talk about “Jewels from the Hinterland” an incredible project that was featured in the New York Times. You said in the NYT piece, “When I first started talking about the concept, one of my former classmates asked me how this work would differ from images of slavery. The fact that that was his only framework for imagining black people in nature was exactly what stirred me to make my first portraits.” What impact do you think the project had in reimagining what is possible with Black peoples’ relationship with nature within a recorded context? What did the project do for your imagination?
One of my clients often talks about dreaming as the key to world-making and expansive imagination. 2020 was oppressive in that way, so many of us couldn't think beyond the day or hour. I was too anxious to dream. “Jewels from the Hinterland” was my first long-term series and still remains key to how I remind myself that the worlds and experiences I’ve had and know to be true for me and so many others, need to be seen and documented, and reinforced. That work does so much for me beyond the act of representation. It brings in leisure, play, rest, and the pleasure of existing and being enveloped by nature into conversation with Blackness. While the work is slow in some ways (I think it’ll be a lifelong series), it accelerated my understanding of the need for these types of images and the ways that they can and do create disruptions and glitches in preexisting narratives of Black people within cities.
Making “Jewels from the Hinterland” also co-created an expansive community. I met and became friends with so many fascinating people through the act of picturing them and the experience that happens around that—often a walk and chatting for some time before I start the process of image-making. With this work, I am also interested in the mapping of people and places. I’m going to quote my friend, scholar Remi Onabanjo because she says it eloquently. “Entitled “Jewels from the Hinterland,” the series is informed by an interest in mapping urban sites, but in a manner that is more associative, than cartographic. Featuring landscapes selected for their relation to the lived experiences of her subjects, Green’s pictures render nuanced portraits of Prospect Heights Community Farm, Morningside Park, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Central Park as much as they do of poet Morgan Parker, painter Jordan Casteel, writer Collier Meyerson, and editor Jason Parham.”