Through my practice, I work to understand the relationship between Blackness and visibility at the site of the camera to contend with the ways that the photographic medium works to perform violence on Black people through complicity, desensitization, and (in)visibility. My work is an effort to imagine new ways for the Black subject to perform dark sousveillance; coined by Simone Browne as “the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight”. I locate my work at the intersection of the history of Black photographic representation, and the future of Black peoples amidst widening utilizations of the image within contemporary surveillance practices. At that point, the camera is representative of not only itself, but the greater societal and governmental systems within which images function; rendering sculpture, writing, and the image as apt vehicles to describe this point of intersection and push beyond it.

In my current thinking, the triangle is a means to map the relationship between the viewer, subject, and maker; the convergence of surveillance practices, the camera, and Blackness at the site of the image; and the interaction between histories of Black photographic representation, and future images as participants in contemporary artificial intelligence technology. The goal of my practice is to rotate the viewer—subject—maker relationship present in figural representations, placing the Black subject at the top and reconfiguring the surveilling power dynamic between those who are privileged to observe through the white gaze, and those who are rendered hypervisible by their Blackness.