I remember the day my first girl was born. I was afraid, excited and overwhelmed! I remember feeling I had been given this amazing gift that would require all my monetary, intellectual and artistic resources. In short, I was and continue to be, a fortunate artist, father and husband. Many of these feelings became tempered when I began to phone family and friends and share the news of the arrival of my newborn daughter, Grand. When I spoke to the female fraction of friends and family, most were genuinely excited; however, some actually said, "When are you going to try for that boy?"
This remark caught me off guard; my wife was barely coherent and extremely tired, why on earth would I be thinking about yet another child, boy, girl, or whatever?! The men on my list showed no restraint in expressing disappointment or downright disapproval that my first child was not a boy.
As I proceeded to have more children these conflicted feelings would creep up as the birth of another child came near. Sandee (my wife) would give me two more beautiful girls, Frances and Ellice. I went into self-preservation mode and shared my good fortune only with those friends and family who were not predisposed to preference one gender over another.
This experience sharpened my understanding of ill gender relations, the manifestations of which I noticed in all forms of art, politics and popular culture.
As an artist I began to strategize how could I use my art practice to engage in a critical discourse and use my experience as a father of girls as a conceptual framework to make interesting and evocative photographs? By employing my daughters as subject matter I hoped to feed their unconscious minds by stressing the importance of their collective experience as young women. By using the camera and the collaborative apparatus as a mediator of their experience and by extension, ones worth as a femal in a male dominated society.
The challenge before me: how to avoid the commonplace, objectification of women proliferated in every form of media, from Vogue to Vibe, from American Next Top Model to the generic BET, VH1, music video. I decided that the images would emphasize the commonplace instead of the glamour.