Fieldnotes on How Roots Flourish Without Soil

At its core, this is a documentary endeavor following my friends. It is quite simply a collection of images with the homies in our down time, family time, and the other times.

When I’m asked to intellectualize it, I say this collection is a record and representation of the resilience that constantly inspires our communities to be the breeding ground for faith, love and a limitless compassion. It is a guide to forming a vocabulary for what it means to live.

Composed of private images, during family time on weekends, birthdays, sporting events, funerals, and holidays, Fieldnotes is less focused on the distractions of the city’s relationship to violence and adversity, and it more precisely celebrates the family and the idea of tenacity. The collection is an introduction to my nephew Amari Johnson, and some of the people who aim to create a life for him and all the children in the family, free from the stressors of the immediate environment.

The project serves as a counter-narrative that Black men are absent fathers and neglects studies that have demonstrated otherwise. Somewhere along the way, the circumstances of mass incarceration, state sponsored murders, violence against poverty, amongst other factors morphed into a mentality and perception that Black men are not present; a feeling exacerbated by the disposability of their bodies.

Accordingly, it is a project concerned with demonstrating the practices and values that create an environment that allows for a sustained ability to make a home where no one wanted us in the first place, planting deep roots wherever it is we come to exist. As the series continues, I mean to show where the beauty exists: within the people.

The project is not overly poetic in that it doesn’t mean to romanticize living in our present conditions. In fact, it’s my desire that it opens a larger dialogue ruminating over where we find comfort and what we learn to be comfortable with.

It becomes clear that the notion of survival and family in our neighborhoods is fluid, continually building, shifting, amassing a true village. Everyone is a brother, sister, auntie, uncle, cousin, mom and dad; the relationships run deeper than blood. Because it’s understood that family is not something you are born with, it is something that is built

And how within them, there’s frameworks for caring for each other, and pride in our diasporic roots, and faith in something bigger than ourselves; something that can only be fostered in the way it does because of the very realities of poverty, precarity, surveillance, and policing we experience.

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