I’m a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller using photography, poetry, and film to archive Black life as ritual, resistance, and radical imagination. Rooted in the South Side of Chicago and shaped by global Black traditions, my work centers memory, movement, and the sacred beauty of everyday survival.
Sunday Service is a visual hymn—a documentary love letter to Black joy, spiritual frequency, and the sacred lineage of the dance floor. Shot inside the historic Stony Island Arts Bank and curated by the soulful DJ Duane Powell, these portraits and candid frames capture more than just a party—they capture a ritual.
Here, the architecture of the old bank meets the architecture of our bodies in motion. Light, sweat, and sound become sacraments. You see elders and youth, kin and strangers, all gathered not to escape the world—but to enter it differently, through rhythm.
These images center Black presence in its most liberated form: swaying, laughing, praising, glowing. Through this lens, the dance floor becomes church. The needle becomes sermon. And the joy? An inheritance—passed down through wax, memory, and movement.
These typewritten fragments are not just words — they are traces. Pressed into the page with the weight of intention, they carry the residue of memory, grief, and ancestral breath. Each misaligned letter, ink smudge, or overstruck word becomes a record of process — a document of not only what was said, but how it was made.
This series draws from the visual language of typewriters, aged paper, and poetic minimalism to explore Black interiority, loss, and survival. These are field notes from the spirit — drafted in silence, addressed to the dead, the beloved, and the unknown reader.
I am interested in what emerges when language falters — when erasure, gaps, and repetition say more than explanation ever could. The typewriter becomes a tool of both resistance and intimacy — resisting digital smoothness, demanding slowness, and marking every gesture with permanence.
This is Black archival practice as visual poem. As altar. As refusal to forget.
blk excellence is both praise and provocation—a digital series that interrogates the phrase we celebrate without always unpacking. Through manipulated portraiture, layered typography, and lo-fi graphic collage, this work explores what it means to wear the phrase “Black excellence” while holding grief, rage, fatigue, and contradiction.
This series is not about polished pride. It’s about complexity. I layer archival textures, fragmented quotes, and visual noise to push against the flattening of Black identity into symbols of success or digestible resilience. Some portraits are defiant. Some are barely holding it together. Some are exhausted beneath the gold.
The phrase “blk excellence” becomes a frame, a burden, a prayer, and a mask—depending on who is looking and who is being seen. These images ask: What does excellence cost? Who defines it? And what do we lose when we only show what survives?
god gives rest / not sleep is a visual prayer in triptychs. Each piece is composed of layered portraits framed by bands of color—gold, purple, orange—drawing from both West African spiritual palettes and emotional color theory. The figures are still, soft, and centered, often with downcast eyes or closed hands. They are not posing. They are resting. And in that rest, they resist.
This series was born out of exhaustion—emotional, physical, historical. It asks: What does Black rest look like when rest has been stolen? What does spiritual restoration mean in a world that demands performance? The triptych format mirrors religious iconography, inviting reverence. These are not simply portraits—they are votives. They honor Black stillness as ceremony and protection.
juke. is an exploration of rhythm, ritual, and resistance. Inspired by West African masquerade traditions and Chicago’s footwork and house culture, this series captures movement as sacred language. The figures—sometimes masked, sometimes blurred—are caught mid-motion, surrounded by vibrant fields of red, green, black, and gold. Time is bent. Frames are layered. Linear perspective is disrupted.
This is not documentary photography—it’s visual mythology. juke. connects the ecstatic release of the dance floor to ancestral memory. It celebrates Black bodies as both archive and instrument. The series is loud, sweaty, abstract—and reverent. Each image is a reminder that our movements are inheritance. That joy can be both survival and ritual.
feels is a visual journal of emotional memory—an ongoing series of digital compositions that center vulnerability, softness, and intimacy across Black life. Each piece draws from quiet gestures: a glance held too long, hands on shoulders, bodies in rest, small griefs not spoken aloud. These images are not about spectacle; they are about presence.
Using lo-fi textures, muted palettes, and slow layering, feels sits at the intersection of photo, design, and feeling. I’m interested in what emotion looks like before it becomes language—how it lives in the body, how it echoes in silence. Some pieces are sourced from real encounters, some from memory, some from longing.
Model: Eric Payne