Race/Related: Speaking to the Future

December 14, 2019

By Pierre-Antoine Louis

The work of the Brooklyn-based artist and photographer John Edmonds has been noted for its striking formalism and exploration of identity, sexuality and desire among black communities — black lovers, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers.

This year, his work was shown in the Whitney Biennial. In May, he will have his first solo museum exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

One of Mr. Edmonds’s ambitions as an artist, he says, is for viewers to walk away thinking more deeply about their relationship to a place, person or thing. It was a central idea behind a recent exhibition at Company Gallery, in which the photographs on view explored representations of the black body and the spiritual and emotional value of African art objects.

“I like the way that in all these pictures, there’s a kind of oscillation between the real and the imagined,” Mr. Edmonds, 30, said. The pictures, he added, are about the space between who someone is in the real world and who they could become in a more spiritual world.

I spoke with Mr. Edmonds about five of his photographs from the Company Gallery show for Race/Related.

You can read our interview and see some of his work here.

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