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12.29.23

Hello Again,

I hope that this letter finds you lazing about somewhere with loved ones nearby. As this is the last letter of the year and I’m a bit exhausted, I’m going to forego my usual structure of writing about all the things that I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to.

The holiday season, for so many of us, is the most difficult time of the year. Holidays have never been easy for me as they tend to accentuate the trends of serious dysfunction and discontent within my family. And this time of year also makes it unavoidably clear that I am a very lonely person, in ways I’m not normally comfortable admitting.

As is the constant state of the introspective introvert, I have been in deep, quiet reflection about the state of my life and my interior world. There are many days where the only sounds in this house are my white noise machines and my voice, speaking to myself aloud. Some days, by the afternoon, I realize that I’ve not even heard my own voice and I make a small sound to remind myself that I am still here. I am not a ghost. It’s odd and in many ways exactly what I’ve asked for. In this silent space I’ve been reflecting most consistently on mortality and doing the work.

I’ve been a bit sick and being sick when you live alone is a special kind of hell. I never feel as defeated as I do when I’m ailing. Everything takes effort and every motion is laced with aching. Sometimes, against my better judgement, I feel like I’ve failed at life when I get sick, because I don’t have a partner to take care of me.

This simple sickness, a sinus infection, paired with increasing health disparities and hiccups, has been a bit overwhelming. On Christmas morning I awoke with an intense leg injury out of the clear blue sky. I made a portrait of someone in my studio on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t bend my leg in any strange way or bump it up against anything. The pain was confounding and debilitating, I could barely walk. As I hobbled down the many stairs of my home I started to cry. I felt pitiful and helpless. Nonetheless, I made all of my Christmas calls and sent out sweet texts and voice notes to my loved ones, putting on a brave face and convincing everyone that I was fine. I might have felt pitiful, but I did not want anyone’s pity. Afterward, I sat in silence for a bit and thought about my life, how grateful I am to have achieved so much with just passion, ambition, and guile. How grateful I am to have the friends that I do, who love me in spite of how unlovable I often feel. I imagined a life for myself where I was better, healthier, and happier. And I thought intensely about this period of transition, how no area of my world: my friendships, my family, my finances, my health, or my work feels safe or stable. Everything is moving, everything is shifting and how absolutely dizzying it is to have nothing secure to hold onto.

I hopped over to my bookshelf, waiting desperately for the Tylenol Extra Strength to kick in, and I scoured the shelves for something stabilizing. I landed on Hilton Als, What She Means, a very special exhibition catalogue from a show that Al’s curated to honor one of my great literary loves, Joan Didion. The book houses my second favorite Didion Essay, In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love. I first read this essay in a women’s lit class at Towson University when I was very young and unappreciative. Years later I stumbled on it again while flipping through a vintage issue of Life magazine at the home of one of my elders. I was overjoyed to see this essay republished in this gorgeous collection, alive again and rescued from obscurity by the ever considerate Als. I flipped patiently through the book, and when I landed on the essay I was moved by the slight dent at the bottom of the page, as if it remembered me and was expecting me. I read the essay standing by the window, the soothing smell of cinnamon tea lilting in the air and the red and green Christmas lights from the bar across the street from my house distracting me tauntingly. Coincidentally, I read this essay last Christmas too. Perhaps this is a quiet tradition in the making? I read it twice, once tearfully to myself and another time recorded here for you, in case you wanted to spend some time with Didion’s gorgeous words.

I was overcome reading this piece. In the essay, she is swaying back and forth between grieving an imagined life, one of expectation and stereotypical family joys, and standing ten toes down in the ambitious life that she has chosen, one of facing the difficult things and using her gifts to give voice and life to them. I would never compare myself to Didion but I can relate. She is lonely here and resolute.

After my light weeping I limped downstairs to the studio and spent the next seven hours scanning film, retouching images, and watching reruns of Everybody Hates Chris. Christmas was finally behind me.

The next morning, as I reemerged from the house, my leg now on the mend and all my Christmas funk washed away, I got a text message that my friend Jazz’s brother, whom I had photographed, had died. The message stopped me in my tracks, nearly knocking me over. I didn’t even make it to the corner. Three hours later my best friend Malcolm’s aunt lost her battle with cancer, devastating everyone in the family.

I spent my time at the café searching for photographs of these two people, now gone. This grief has been enormous, and in no way out of step with the rest of the year.

My friend Jazz’s brother went by Cash but his given name was Jeremy Paul LaVergne. He was kind and charming. I met the two of them in Baton Rouge in 2018, introduced to them by my beloved Chaka, who has also passed on. I photographed Cash once in 2018 and again in 2020 for the New York Times (though they didn’t use a photograph of him in the final piece). He was always generous, funny, charismatic, and patient.

Malcolm’s Aunt Jocelyn was a stabilizing and central maternal force in her family, a beacon of care and support for so many. She bought Malcolm a car before he was even driving age, a memory he often shares fondly. Malcolm’s familial relationships are as hellish and complicated as my own, but where I had an Aunt Carolyn, making a safe space for me to be myself, Malcolm had Aunt Jocelyn, a consistent force for good in his life. I was with Malcolm the day that he reunited with his family, after spending 13 years living in Hawaii. Thankfully I had a camera in hand. Aunt Jocelyn hated being photographed but I’m grateful that I was able to capture some images of this special moment.

As I compiled images of these two beautiful, buoyant spirits, I grew winded by weariness. I was reminded of a job I was commissioned for last summer, tasked with photographing a photographer from Albany, NY. She started out photographing members of her community then started teaching young people in the community about film photography at a local recreation center. She made portraits of hundreds of these young people and used her skills and passion to try and show them a different way of life, one rooted in artistic expression. However, as time went on she watched so many young people die that it made her sick. She got so many emails, texts, and phone calls to provide photos of her young people for their obituaries that she said it filled up her entire phone. An endless scroll of dead young Black people. This led her to put the camera down, stepping away from photography altogether. I remember when she told me this story it shook me to my core, truly. I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to me for the very same thing. Sometimes it feels like if I’m going to focus my camera on Black people that I automatically sign up to focus my camera on death. It’s a morbid deduction, a grotesque correlation that’s hard to prove, but it feels that way at times. Even though I seek out joy, I seek out brotherhood, I seek out families, death tends to always be a subtext, a possibility, a fear.

It is the great honor of my life to photograph my people, to offer this gesture of centering and celebrating folks who may go their whole lives without such consideration. But this part, the death and the dying, feels like a terrible consequence of doing the work and a burden I struggle to carry.

Last week, while reading the latest issue of Apartamento, I came across an interview with Akwaeke Emezi. I had never read anything by them because I don’t usually enjoy fiction and novels are the bulk of their literary contributions. But I know some people who know them and I’ve always admired their unique beauty and their prolific capacity for writing, not just books, but very successful books. The interview was intriguing and I laughed out loud at their dry humor. I also felt a kindred energy when they spoke so boldly about their relationship to suicidality. This made me curious about their work so I purchased their memoir, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. I started reading it right away and I was hooked. The memoir, written in epistolary form, features a series of letters written to loved ones. I was really enjoying the sharp sentences and the spiritual, otherworldly quality of the author’s voice. Then I got to, “Execution | Dear Nonso,” a letter about a spell that they used, a simple spell about grit, discipline, and achieving the seemingly impossible dreams one has. The structure of the essay doesn’t reveal what the spell is until the end, building anticipation through outlining all the ways Emezi believes in its power and has experienced its profound resolution. Then, they reveal the spell. Face your work. I was literally shocked.

If there is a mantra in my life, a saying that I have clung to to make it this far, it is those three words. Face your work. For years it was my Instagram bio and I wouldn’t shut up its spiritual significance. When I collaborated with my dear friend and brilliant artist Luis Santana on a capsule collection of shirts and tote bags a few years ago, he asked me to send him a quote or a mantra that I lived by and, of course, that’s what I chose. Face your work, stamped prominently down the side of the tote bags and in a coy circle on the front of the shirts.

For some reason, over the past two and half years I’ve stopped reciting this mantra, it somehow fell out of favor or faded into the background. Perhaps the difficulties of this work, of this career, and of this world became too much for this tiny sentence. Seeing these words in Emezi’s letter, imbued with their ritualistic interpretation and spiritual significance, revived the term for me. I felt energized. I was reminded of the many times that uttering that phrase soothed, reassured, and grounded me. An entire world of spiritual depth, strength, and perseverance invoked by three little words. I’m grateful to this gorgeous text for reminding me and I made a promise to myself that I would not forget again. So, I closed the book, walked around the corner to my local tattoo parlor, and used the same design Luis came up with on the shirts, a nod to him and his unwavering belief in me and my work.

I wish I could say that I was leaving 2023 enthusiastic, optimistic, and excited for what 2024 holds. I am not. I’m in many other less glamorous states of being, punctured, depleted, anxious, and heartbroken by the world. But my major hope for myself and for my community is that we all continue forward, grateful for more opportunities to show up and to do the work of loving and fighting, and to face that work unflinchingly. I’m manifesting things so grand I dare not speak them aloud. Won’t you join me?

Happy New Year, friend!