Highlighting Mikeal Owunna's Infinite Essense Series
I, like so many other people around the world, have struggled to cope with and understand the recent events surrounding the death of George Floyd. Race is a difficult thing to consider, perhaps even more difficult for white males like myself since we can never fully understand what it is like to be a person of a color living in a majority white society. I think the best we can do is to listen, to empathize to our best ability, be allies, and to be engines for understanding, tolerance, and the change that this country so obviously needs.
To that end, I wanted to share the work of a photographer who’s work I came across before the protests began that made me re-consider how I view race, particularly in the media I and most Americans consume every day. In his series Infinite Essence, Mikael Owunna shows black bodies as the cosmos, resembling nebulae in deep space astrophotography.
The images are beautiful and brimming with color and contrast. Human forms of pure texture and color seemingly emanate from nothing. Using fluorescent paints and a UV-band adapted strobe, Mikael shows the black body as transcending the physical, becoming eternal.
In his statement, Mikael mentions something that resonated with me that I hadn’t fully considered, certainly not in such elegant words. He writes,
Infinite Essence is my response to pervasive media images of 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.
What if the only images you saw of people who looked like you were dead and dying bodies? How would that affect the way you move through the world, how would that enter (and hamper) your body?
I won’t offer my interpretation or otherwise comment on this excerpt from his statement except to say that it shook me and made me aware of just how conditioned I and our society are to images of black suffering, even elevating the images of it almost to works of art.
