D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Nah, 2018

D'Angelo Lovell Williams: Hi, my name is D’Angelo Lovell Williams, and I am a Brooklyn-based artist from Jackson, Mississippi.

Narrator: The setting of this photograph, with no markers of contemporary/modern life, could suggest a view back in time. When making this image, Lovell Williams was thinking about  history and their own family's past.

D'Angelo Lovell Williams: I was thinking a lot about ancestry and it was a lot about myself that I didn't even know. I hadn’t done my own ancestry yet at that point. I had always been attracted to making images in bodies of water.

I made a lot of my work outdoors, and there was this sort of involvement with the landscape that I was challenging myself to put myself into and make images with. I don't really know how to swim. I can swim above water, but I can't hold my breath long enough to swim underwater.

Narrator: The artist experimented with staging their tripod and camera from multiple vantage points. The resulting photograph captures them facing away from the viewer, their legs in a V-shape pointing outward, away from us.

D'Angelo Lovell Williams: This image went through many, many edits. But I wanted this sort of leaving a viewer, leaving the experience of... And going into the sort of idea of freedom and not looking back to what could have been or what should have been. 

I think the specifics of the dress for me were more so just what I wanted to do in it or with it. I definitely wanted it to look ghostly. And I felt like it also spoke to a material type of dress that wasn't seen on a lot of black people's bodies, especially in a body of water as well. Not caring enough to get in the water with the dress on. 

Being able to be in this position to make the image, knowing that there were people who came before me who couldn't live and experience or see themselves. Or someone similar to themselves in a position like this. That I'm wanting to scream freedom here for other people in this particular way, at least.