New Orleans, Louisiana | Mentor: Doug DuBois
Brandon Holland is a New Orleans-born art and documentary photographer. His work is concerned with environment, kinship, blackness, and the delicate nature of things. He uses photography as a means of preservation and connecting with the world around him. He splits time working and living in Baltimore and New Orleans.
Project Statement
Through the project ‘All of Me Remembers’ I explore my identity and place within the greater African diaspora through history, culture, and nature. The work is informed by the Ghanaian philosophy of Sankofa, or ‘to return and get it’. It is a process of returning to one’s roots and reconnecting with the past in order to inform the future.
I use the environment as a link between the past and the present. What does the land remember? I know my ancestors congregated under this tree, what has it seen? Within this exploration there’s a conscious decoupling of the psychic violence that has been so tightly bound to the American landscape as a result of America’s brutal origins. We are more than our pain, and our connection to the land stretches far beyond the trauma that has taken place on it. Depictions of rest and leisure become a spiritually and politically necessary act. There is power in healing.
This connection to the land is crucial and ties into my practice of Ubuntu. The term, translated from Zulu, meaning ‘I Am because We Are’, speaks to the inextricable link between the individual and the collective. We are all interconnected. In my eyes this includes the natural world. By rejecting the othering of nature, the idea of ‘We’ becomes so much greater. I treat nature photography as portraiture, approaching the natural world as a collaborator to be engaged with rather than an object to be observed. In this way it’s hard to feel alone when you are surrounded by life.
I photograph strangers within the natural world, but truthfully they don’t feel like strangers. Portraits of myself, relatives, and these strangers are interwoven, blurring the line of who is kin. African American ancestry is often hard to trace. How does one define family?
Displacement is a recurring theme- friends and families separated, neighborhoods destroyed. I look for traces- memorials, rituals, anything to help us remember- to feel whole again. The practice reminds me I am a part of something much greater- a sacred truth that is so easy to forget. Despite countless efforts to erase, separate, and dismantle, we find each other and the culture blossoms. We second line, sing, and create. This elation is crucial to see- to feel all of our pain one must feel all of our joy.
So we pay homage- to the land, to our ancestors, their rituals- and from this homage spring our own rituals, our own way of being. We mourn with all of our heart, then we dance with all of our heart.