At the height of the racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s, Breonna Taylor’s, and Tony McDade’s deaths by law enforcement in 2020, a group of six young Black photographers organized themselves into the collective See In Black. Spearheaded by the New York–based image makers Micaiah Carter and Joshua Kissi, the mission was simple: use art to affirm that Black life, disproportionately affected by the coronavirus and state-sanctioned violence, matters beyond moments of crisis.
“See In Black formed as a collective of Black photographers to dismantle white supremacy and systemic oppression,” the coalition’s statement of solidarity reads. “Our intention is to replenish those we’ve been nourished by.” Their first action was to establish a print sale titled Vol. 001 Black In America, which included snapshots, street scenes, self-portraits, still lifes, and editorial images of Blackness by nearly eighty photographers. Collectively, these intimate portrayals present community as an act of hope. Image by image, you see Black America honestly gazed at from within the circle of lived experience. At a time of deep despair, their photographs were a testament that Black narratives will not be devalued. The print sale raised over $500,000, which they donated to five homelessness, youth, queer, political, and legal organizations.
A number of the photographers call New York home. The city, battered badly over the past year, has allowed these artists to establish themselves creatively and to attune their eyes to construct counternarratives that squarely capture what the collective calls “Black prosperity.” Here, I speak with seven of the photographers about how art meets activism in New York.
Joshua Kissi
AS: How does New York inform your practice as an image maker?
JK: Being of West African descent, in a place in the Bronx that has a lot of West Africans, people from Ghana and Nigeria and Guinea and Senegal, made me think about what this vibrancy looked like within my work. I always thought, What do color and tone look like? How do I make this photo feel like you’re really in Little Senegal, or on the west side of the Bronx?
AS: You see the multiplicity in Blackness in your images. There
