I think that a lot of my photos are ways for me to explore things that I may lack or cannot totally understand because of my upbringing, identity and personal limitations. I have always been interested in the general motivations of others and how they think, move and live; and I think the fact that I have a psychology degree reinforces this (or maybe that is why I studied psychology in the first place). In this project, I want to understand the role compassion plays in the lives women and non-binary people that work in the climate and environmental justice fields. 

This project is closely related more to my work in the climate justice space and my interest in the general tenets of buddhism. Compassion plays a large role in how I live my life and do my work and advocating for a more just world is challenging, especially for a black person born in and living in America. On the other hand, I realize that there are privileges that I have that are not afforded to many people and many of my mentors and leaders that I admire in the climate justice movement have to deal with a lot more just because of not being born a man, either in the biological sense or gender wise.

I want to know how people that are dealing with constant oppression and danger still fight to try to save a world filled with people who would wish harm upon them constantly. For this project, I plan to do a number of portraits, starting off with an interview while asking my subjects to sit naturally.

The second part involves some staged poses of Kanon, or Guanyin or Avalokiteśvara, (depending on the country), the buddhist personification of compassion. Kanon is neither a man nor woman and has been depicted both in artwork and stories. I ask the subjects to approximate a few poses based on some images I have of Kanon (along with public domain photos that I edit into my visual style) and when I edit the photos, I add a few surrealistic touches to the photos of the people to further heighten the relationship with the bodhisattva. Those touches are inspired by the works of Kerry James Marshall, one of my favorite painters and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the famed NY artist who died at a quite young age. 

Through my projects, I want to gain understanding of parts of the human condition that I either missed out on or cannot really fathom. At first, I thought of photography as a substitute for drawing and illustration, which I can’t physically do anymore, but now I see it as something else entirely and more as a way to gain a deeper understanding of people and to illustrate the  motivations and meaning behind people’s relationships to each other and what compassion looks like.