Art
feature: the complexity of blackness – the photography of elliott brown jr.
My name is Elliott Brown Jr. and I’m a visual artist. My photography attests to the breadth and complexity of Blackness by explicating the internal and external forces that create it. My work specifically considers the intersection between Blackness and homosexuality. With an understanding of how identities are socialized and performed, my work grapples with notions of privacy as they are informed by public and political discourses. Using self-portraiture as my foremost medium, I create a point of entry for the queer identity into historical and contemporary productions of Blackness. My current series visualizes a racial discourse within interracial intimacies. Focusing on my relationships with white men, I’m looking at the space where desire becomes political; what social parameters inform desire? In what ways have I sought to be fulfilled and validated by these relationships? Likewise, how have I been desired by these men? By subverting traditional understandings of power dynamics, this work communicates the disturbances that can appear in these relationships. See my work below (some images are NSFW).
By Elliott Brown Jr., AFROPUNK Contributor
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elliottbrownjr.com
Instagram: elliott.jerome
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