We sought out young visionaries to help us imagine a new way of relating to each other and the world
Visionary: Tracy Awino, Photographer
This work is an intimate storytelling into the complexities and multi-dimensionalities that exist within today’s black youth. The work explores identity within a rapidly shifting and noisy society.
I have younger siblings who are all teenagers. It’s remarkable to watch them navigate a world unfamiliar to me at their age. They are young, black in America and of direct African descent. There is a lot to unpack there, but most importantly I wanted to explore the influences on their ideas of identity; I wanted to know how they saw the world around them.
The piece uses contrasting imagery to explore the juxtaposition between two forces: The world’s idea of who young black kids are and how they are meant to fit in the environment around them, and how in my eyes they actually fit in the world around them. I used durags, which are often associated with “hood black” (and only recently have transformed publicly into meaning more than that) and a luscious park setting (instead of a stereotypical [urban] one).
I named this project A Future Imagined, and in my eyes a future imagined lies in my hands just as much as it lies in the hands of the generation after me. Tracy was born and raised in Kenya and later moved to Alabama. She currently lives in New York where she is the staff photographer for The Bleacher Report.
P.S. There’s More
- Emmy winner Cord Jefferson gives us a lesson in empathy
- The other-worldly collage art of Dejah Greene
- Our editorial vision for the launch