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PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAHBETH MANEY
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By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences
“Black joy is your best summer day in your most stylish outfit,” says photographer and filmmaker Dee Dwyer. “It’s freedom, you know? It’s having no fear,” she says, pausing. “Just like Nina Simone states: Freedom is having no fears.”
Dee is one of several artists who photo editor Maya Valentine approached to celebrate the Black experience by highlighting artists who dedicated a lot of their work–if not all of it–to visualizing the stories of their own community. In writing the Nat Geo story, Rachel Jones noted that Black joy often comes with a caveat: “We are happy that we can function in a system that was designed to keep us obedient, invisible, and disenfranchised.”
In Maya’s interviews, “each storyteller–artist, filmmaker, photographer–was asked the same three questions–about traditions, untold stories, joy, love, and resilience. With each interview, we heard about the role that Black joy plays in their work and personal lives.”
“Black joy is really reclaiming the right to rejoice because for so long that was something that was not offered to Black people,” says Sarahbeth Maney, who knows a thing or two about capturing joy. Her photograph of Leila Jackson, made during the hearings that confirmed her mother Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, went viral. “It feels like a form of protest but also it feels like a form of healing.” (At top is her photo on the meaning of sisterhood, set beside Oakland’s Lake Merritt; below, on the South Side of Chicago, two images of what photographer Akilah Townsend calls “an ode to memories of summertime Chi.”)
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