As a photographer, I frame the stories that don't typically make America’s highlight reel. My work reflects this country’s “complicated” truths; especially the parts we’re often told to forget. At an HBCU, I learned histories that have stayed with me, reshaping what I choose to see and what I choose to show. That knowledge guides my lens today. Growing up, I struggled with questions of identity. I bubbled in “African American” on scantrons without fully understanding what that meant. My last name is Brannon, which is Irish, but that doesn’t make me Irish. It likely comes from someone who claimed my ancestors, not someone we came from. At 22, I’m trying not to say “I hate America.” Instead, I’m choosing to look closer at what’s overlooked. Photography gives me that time. Time to sit in moments, to be with people, to listen. It helps me process the questions I couldn’t articulate as a kid. I create the images I needed to see growing up: scenes of joy, freedom, peace, and moments of stillness untouched by outside noise. I’ve always been drawn to graffiti, not the finished walls, but the journey. The 3am walks down train tracks, the fences climbed, the pieces painted in silence that might be gone by sunrise. There’s something deeply human in that act: the need to create, even if it won’t last. That’s where I see Black boy joy, not staged, just lived. In those moments, Black men get to be boys again: free to roam, to make, to play without permission. Even in the eyes of the police, you’re seen as a kid again. That urgency, that disappearing beauty, it mirrors how we’ve watched things we care about vanish before we could name what they meant to us. So I photograph what I want to last.
