After eighteen years with my father, we barely had any photographs together. Now that he’s no longer here, my memories of him feel faint—almost imagined. Photography wasn’t as accessible then as it is now. Family albums rarely captured the quiet intimacy of everyday life beyond the controlled environment of a photo studio. Hero, Father, Friend is both a biopic of my father and a photographic meditation on Black fatherhood and the archive. It’s an attempt to materialize the memories I never got to hold—to picture the moments my dad and I never got to live.

With this body of work, I also paint a hopeful portrait of what could have been—an imagined timeline of shared dreams. I invite the viewer to consider the quiet, often overlooked silhouettes of Black fatherhood and sonship: those undocumented yet deeply felt. This project celebrates fatherhood as a gift that extends beyond biology—offered through uncles, mentors, Pastors, and elders whose presence helped shape my understanding of love and care. Moments at the beach, piano lessons, football with cousins—these filled the absence of my father and taught me that presence can take many forms.

I believe Black fathers are central to the Black family portrait. Through this work, I consider how portraiture might shift our understanding of fatherhood—from a role marked by responsibility or absence to one rooted in love, legacy, and grace.

Hero, Father, Friend is personal. I take on both roles: photographer and imagined subject. These stories are mine—not just because I created them, but because I once lived them or wished them into being. This work is a gesture toward memory, imagination, and what it means to long for something you never had. It’s an offering—inviting us to treat the quiet, the mundane, and the deeply human with the same care as the monumental.