‘Every Black Person Deserves To See Themselves This Way’
Using fluorescent body paint and ultraviolet light, photographer Mikael Owunna’s latest work aims to transform the black body into “the cosmos and eternal.” The images evoke celestial beings, magical and otherworldly.
But the concept for the project, Infinite Essence, was sparked by frustration and exhaustion.
The 28-year-old Nigerian-Swedish photographer, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., and is based there now, says he grew weary of the barrage of violent, dehumanizing imagery of black people he saw in the media.
“Black people dead and dying. Being gunned down by police officers, drowning and washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, starving and suffering in award-winning photography. The trope of the black body as a site of death is everywhere,” he says in his artist statement.
“If the majority of images that you see of yourself are negative,” Owunna says, “if people who look like you are dead or dying or captured in a negative light, how do those images enter your body?”
Owunna wanted to counteract the pain of those photos, to create imagery that showed the black body not as a site of death but as a site of magic.
