In the Absence of Cowboys

Project Statement:

This work began as a question about what photography remembers—and what it chooses to forget.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge photographed a horse in motion. The horse’s name survived in history books; the Black man riding him did not. Science called this neutrality, an “unbiased” study of motion. But the camera’s impartiality is a myth. Every frame decides who is seen, who is named, who is preserved.

As a photographic process the work consists of an emulsion built from salt, my semen, the semen of men I’ve been intimate with, and semen from horses. It’s part chemistry, part archive, part love letter. Salt is in the ocean, in the body, in the earliest photographs. Semen is a living record: each sample carries desire, memory, DNA. In the darkroom, the two fuse, fixing light into something that can’t be separated from the life that made it.

For the first work in this series, I turned to the 1970s film Black Rodeo, where the rodeo comes to Harlem for the first time. I removed the cowboys entirely, leaving only women and children watching from the stands. My eye landed on two young Black boys rolling in play. I compressed several moments into a single frame—a quadruple exposure in the semen-salt process—folding time in on itself, as memory often does.

This work reverses Muybridge’s leap from photography to cinema. I move from cinema back into stillness, slowing the circulation of Black bodies in the archive. Erasure is not always destruction—it can also be a way of imagining what is missing, of feeling a presence in its absence. The print carries this double life: image and body, motion and residue, naming and forgetting.