I will not ever again let someone impose a European beauty standard on me within my own industry. I will not forget or ignore or sweep under the rug just how barbaric of a place America is compared to the rest of the world. Now, how has that relationship changed? It hasn't career-wise, but what has shifted for me in my own personal world is that I will not forget this year or this moment. I was going to be creating a new live show-this was the year that was supposed to shift my career safely into a place where I would not have to question my longevity as a musician. I worked all of 20 on two separate albums I am extremely proud of. Twenty-twenty was supposed to be the year that elevated my career by a lot. How has your relationship to your art changed during the pandemic and recent racial-justice protests? I try to make space to grieve and observe. Janet Mock asks Terence Nance: In the midst of so much tragedy and strife, how do you cope and create? In short, how do you continue to fly as a Black artist in America? I think maybe it's to find the most useful questions, a story through which people who are not in the mode of creating stories in a particular moment can see their failures solved and unsolved again, and feel all right because they are there, in the story, outside of themselves-unresolved. Maybe it's caution, speculating on a solution that will embrace its insufficiency. Maybe it's to move through castes and sects unmolested by belonging. The role of the artist is precarious and maybe not even a thing. I wish I had an image that communicated the necessity of healing oneself and patterning healing for anyone who might be listening or watching. I now understand, better." Hopefully, that feeling sticks with the viewer in a way that they feel, think, and act differently in the world. What I want to feel when I create-and when I engage with others' works-is a feeling of "Yasss. To reflect the truth, unapologetically and without a chaser. The playful things that are perplexing and layered. I’m using the thickness of photographic density as an open-ended question to myself about what exists in the beyond, in the corners of my mind. I’m trying to be in conversation with the felt, not seen. I was frightened to reach beyond my mind’s eye. I was essentially carbon-copying what I remember. That process of making images felt right, but it wasn’t the most imaginative, and those images weren’t always the most felt. Capturing that feeling in the in-between frames. When I first started shooting, I was working toward rendering my dreams through persistence of vision. Tyler Mitchell asks Bradford Young: What did images mean to you when you entered the filmmaking industry, and what do they mean to you now? And to hopefully strike up conversations and actions about those topics-but that's just a bonus, not a requirement. It's our job to make the world consider our condition in ways it has never considered before. The role of the artist now is the same as it has always been, which is to lead people into new and uncharted waters.
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