Vanessa Leroy

as our bodies lift up slowly (ongoing) | There isn’t a lot of space for dreaming in an oppressive world, so I use photography as a tool to create worlds where I freely navigate the various facets of my life experience and identity as a black queer woman. In this body of work titled "as our bodies lift up slowly," I weave the viewer between the past and present using archival family photographs, text, collages, and environmental portraits. I’m inspired by Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, in which the young black protagonist Dana Franklin navigates a shifting timeline to uncover truths about her family lineage.

Additionally, I employ text from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, a story following a formerly enslaved woman named Sethe whose home is haunted by the spirit of her deceased child, creating a situation where she and her daughter are constantly swallowed by the overwhelming grief of losing years of life to brutal slavery and the loss of a life that never got to grow. I create photographs that speak to and comfort my younger self, and the versions of myself that struggled to carry the weight of having poor mental health and low self-esteem. In revisiting the past and imagining the future, I have created space for myself to heal in the present. vanessaleroy.com