Art

Eye Mask: Mexico with Naima Green

The Gran Hotel with a stained glass window designed by Jacques Gruber in 1908.
The Gran Hotel with a stained glass window designed by Jacques Gruber in 1908.

Naima Green and I first met on the set of our Terence Nance cover shoot. She arrived earlier than me and was already set by the time I even arrived. We got a drink afterwards near hers and she told me she was going to move to Mexico City and leave New York behind for a little. In my experience there are two kinds of people, those who threaten to leave and those who actually do. The later have a chutzpah that I'm constantly trying to summon. Green overflows with it. I remember the feeling of her weight in a room and I see it in her images. Like her, they are at once devastatingly serious and exuberantly warm. She brings this quality to her portrait sittings but also her rarer still lifes. Here, she shares a smattering of her first year away from home.