As a scholar and an artist, I have been formally invested in the study of portraiture for over two decades. Portrait photography has a problematic history in which the indexicality of the image has somehow been sutured to notions of truth. However, like all technologies, pictures are imbued with the ideologies of those who wield them. My new photographic portrait project, 'All My Loves,' provides a counterpoint to the colonialist pseudo-logics of portrait photography. All My Loves comes from an urge to use portrait photography as a means of expressing my gratitude to the people I hold dear in my life. Notably, each of these collaborators is also committed to making significant impact as cultural producers, scholars, and agents of positive change. Coincidentally, they do not visually appear to fit into any one reductive category, and this is also part of my aim with this work. While portrait photography has historically, in many respects, tended to engage in troubling traditions of categorizing people based on aesthetics, this project defies this reductive way of image-making, instead portraying people tied together by my love for them and shared commitments to making the world a better place. This new project comes from both personal and scholarly interests, while interrogating the limits and advantages of this type of collaboration and its challenges to power dynamics and histories of photographic portraiture.
