What It’s Like To Be (2022) is an ongoing series using self-portraiture as a tool to reclaim the act of image-making, contesting the camera’s colonial history of ‘othering’. Through the slow process of photographing myself on a large format camera, I reflect on the uniqueness of the/my Black experience and create new ways of representing myself devoid of previous colonial perspectives.

Unguarded, I combat and deconstruct conventional standards of what it’s like to be Black, to be masculine, and to be beautiful—restoring my ability to represent myself as Black and Hispanic with my own camera and gaze.