SPECIAL POST: CHECK OUT THE NEW COVER ART OF COMPOSITIONS OF BLACK JOY!
This book will be available for purchase in Fall/Winter 2024. Subscribe to Chasing Light and Shadow for updates.
I am thrilled to share with you the cover art for my first photo book entitled Compositions of Black Joy: A Visual Chronicle of the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival (2015 - 2022)!
Compositions of Black Joy: A Visual Chronicle of the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival (2015-2022) is the companion book to an exhibit of my photographs entitled Documenting the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival: A Visual Chronicle of Community, Resilience and Freedom.
Co-organized by the Johnson House Historic Site and Historic Germantown, the exhibit features nearly 80 photographs that I took in the capacity of the Festival’s official event photographer. It opened September 2023 and is on view at the Germantown Historical Society through the Spring/Summer of 2024.
My images capture the joy, resilience, historical significance, pride and the enduring vitality of a northwest Philadelphia community and its connection to a powerful African-American legacy of freedom, liberation and self-sufficiency.
Before I continue, I want to give a special shout out to Cornelia “Connie” Swinson, executive director of the Johnson House Historic Site and organizer of the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival. Since 2015, Connie has invited me to photograph this annual event and I deeply appreciate and value our nearly decade long association. When I pitched the idea of an exhibit to her in 2022, I was thinking about continuing the conversation on the excitement generated by President Joe Biden signing into law Juneteenth as a federal holiday in 2021. I thought it would make sense to reach back and tell the story of the Festival and how it has evolved over the 7 years that I served as official event photographer. It’s also important to know that the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival has been around for way longer than 2015, this was just the year I began photographing this important cultural event.
I also want to acknowledge Tuomi Forrest, executive director of Historic Germantown, who with the support of his staff, made it possible for this exhibit to come to life.
The book will also feature a selection of archival photos dating back to the early 1900s, of Emancipation Day/Juneteenth celebrations in and around black communities in Houston and Austin, Texas and Richmond, Virginia. The idea is to connect the photos of the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival to a long and rich photographic tradition of capturing the true essence of Juneteenth.
I’m really excited that this project is coming together, mainly because it was almost derailed. I started writing the manuscript weeks after the exhibit opened last September, and I had to put it on ice in November 2023 because of a legal matter involving someone else’s malicious misuse of my image, likeness and my copyrighted intellectual property (mainly my photographs) as part of a larger smear campaign. As a result, I had to shut down most of my socials for eight months.
What did that mean? Basically, I had no digital storefront to promote my exhibit or report on the progress I was making on the book. It also was a dark and lonely period of time for me, as the online harassment, bullying and doxxing began to be too much. I lost a lot, and learned who was really in my corner during that time.
Nevertheless, I was determined to finish what I started. I did end up resuming work on the manuscript in February of 2024 and completing the principal writing and research in April. I reached out to Beth Miner, principal of Mayapple Graphics and designer of all of the wonderful branding for the exhibit (see below photos), to see if she would be willing to collaborate with me on the book project.
So encouraged by her enthusiastic yes, I would soon find a renewed sense of determination to not only finish this book, but to start writing a memoir and mapping out the contours of two other photo books that I plan to publish over the next couple of years.
Beth has been an amazing collaborator and a tremendous resource for this photographer/writer. She and I will be recording an audio conversation where we discuss our process. Subscribe to this Substack and you’ll be able to learn more about how everything came together over the last few months.
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