Kennedi Carter.
When I was in college, I was really into photography, and I loved catching people off guard as much as I could. I wanted to get to that moment behind the pretense, after the pose, where the person relaxes a bit and you can see what’s going on inside them. I took pictures of couples I knew and pictures of my family. I took graduation pictures and even got hired to take family photos once, which was very nerve wracking because I was like 20 years old and definitely not a professional. I took a photography class and thought about becoming a photojournalist, wondered if that was a viable direction for my life to go. But then I went to Greece (plot twist) to try to help out with the Syrian refugee crisis, and more and more people were crossing the sea to get to safety, and one day we went to meet them as they were crossing, and there were grown men desperate, crying, because they’d made it and not everybody did. In fact, a lot of people didn’t. And everybody was emotional, and we were trying to help them cross into Greece, trying to help them however we could, and this one man had his hand reached out because he needed help getting to shore, and this photographer, instead of helping him, took his picture instead. And there was something about that—about his choice to take instead of give—that made me wonder what it meant to be a photographer.
Then social media got more and more popular, and now, everybody’s a photographer. And there’s still that sense of taking that comes with it, that sense that if you take a picture, it’s not just so that you can have a picture but so that you can share it with people online. I saw this video from The New York Times where these kids were sitting down with their parents and telling them that they didn’t feel safe with how many pictures their parents were posting of them, and one mom told her teenager, “If it’s not on Insta, it didn’t even happen.” And that’s kind of scary to me, how the intention of a photo can drift so far from the person in the photo. How being photographed can mean having something taken away from you for the benefit of other people. I love taking pictures, but I don’t want anyone to feel like I’m exposing them in some way, using their image to say something about my own life.
What I love about Kennedi Carter’s work is that with the elegance and the dignity and the intention of her photos, it feels very much like she’s taking them for the people in them, to show them the depth and beauty of themselves. I stumbled upon her work at a Black art museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. I went with my boyfriend to a conference there, and while he did conferency things, I wandered around. Mostly, I camped out in a coffee shop that was open from morning to night. I sat by a window and graded papers and wrote and stared into space until I decided to get up and see what else was going on in this town. I found this museum, and then Kennedi Carter’s work in it, a show called Sight Unseen. Her photos will hold you. They’re both of this world and hovering above it a bit. A Black woman with a jewel-studded cap on, sitting, quiet in her home. The same woman in the same quiet with a Black man, eyes closed, resting against her, his fingers and arms flexed like he’s still winding down. The same woman, just her arms, her legs, a folded up flag, the picture titled Coming of Age in the Milky Way. The colors are full and the people are beautiful and somehow there’s a peace in these photos that can reach you outside of them.
On her website, there are more and more photos like these. Black people in bright colors that somehow calm you down. Often in their homes. It makes me wonder what she said to them to make them this relaxed in front of the camera. How long she waited before she clicked the shutter, and how one becomes the kind of photographer who sees people, who lets them see you back.
I hope, as our phones get fancier and our cameras along with them, we learn how to take pictures of people peacefully, how to not scramble so much that we miss the people right in front of us, the ones that we’re trying to remember.
Image: Kennedi Carter
Link to Kennedi Carter’s work: https://www.kennedi-carter.com
Link to New York Times video on “sharenting”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRPUZ3pufAg
