John Edmonds, Tête d'Homme, 2018

John Edmonds: I'm using photography as a tool to index and make portraits of friends, these sculptures that are from a home in Brooklyn, as well as sculptures that are from West Africa.

Narrator: Artist John Edmonds. 

John Edmonds: I want to think about this interplay of portraiture and still life, while also introducing these photographs that reimagine these different Surrealist photographs that were made in the 1930s where artists such as Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten, using African art and incorporating and appropriating African sculptures into their work.

So I got them from a friend's house in Brooklyn. So most of the objects are objects that have either been gifted to me, they're objects that I've collected myself from street African art vendors, they're objects that I have been culling, pulling together in my own exploration of learning about African sculpture. In a way I'm trying to create this more total portrait of more global understanding of Black iconicity and this idea of icons, and how icons are created.

I think that they were completely taken out of their context and used simply for the purpose of decoration, fetishization. And in my pictures, what I'm interested in is the spiritual potential that these objects could have in the contemporary world.