AGE: 27
BASED IN: London
NOMINATED BY: Tyler Mitchell

Asking me what it means to "make" photographs in 2024 feels the same as asking me what it means to be alive in 2024. I don’t believe that I make photographs. I experience the world as a series of images: images of resilience, resistance, romance, hate, home, pain… I then present those images back to the world so that it can experience me. That feels like taking a little bit of control over this complicated life in 2024.

I am drawn to images of intimacy. I find myself slipping into that a lot—or searching for it. My series "Flags for Countries That Don’t Exist But for Bodies That Do," 2018–23, is about that search—being at once inside and outside of everything and what saves us in the end. I am currently reading many things—from Naomi Klein to Val Wilmer, [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak, and the Bible. All these things influence my work because they help me understand the parts of myself I can’t articulate.

My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, is, "What about the love of two human beings who mate in spite of or because of or instead of or after the fact of?" That quote reminds me to return to love no matter what. Don’t let them win, you know?