The Testament Project is an exploration and a re-conception of contemporary black American masculinity. Black men in America are portrayed in the extreme – either as very rich or very poor, they are domonized, infantilized, ridiculed, idolized or hyper-sexualized; and within the art canon there is a noticeable scarcity of black male representation.
In the colorful Glowan portraits, I give control of the color and lighting to my subjects, in order to create a space that is participatory and empowered. By including my subjects in the creation of the scene in the use of color, I seek to create photographs that portray individuality in addition to their blackness.
In the studio portraits, the subjects are named for their professions to emphasize the depth of their identities beyond race. +kris graves