#3-3: Ayana Jackson

Here I am with the work of photographer Ayana Jackson, who is based both in America and in South Africa. Ayana is deeply interested in how the camera might be a way to speak back to the histories of misrepresentation of African diaspora people in front of the camera. She explores this subject in a mesmerizing and quite playful way.

This image draws inspiration from a 19th-century Manet painting, where each figure is Ayana herself. However, the backdrop is not an Arcadian French environment. It’s not a park, nor a pleasure ground. The background might be somewhere more fraught.

She is interested in how black figures have been the object of hostility, violence, and racialized malignancy. Ayana is fascinated by these presences and their representations and misrepresentations. She is curious about how to bring the black presence back to life, reinvigorated in resistance to a history of othering and violence.

Through her eyes, we see not confinement, not clichés, not othering, but agency, possibility, and whole realms within which she explores. She speaks from her position, from her perspective of possibility and power, in these realms.