Don Claude
MFA ’22 Photography
Looking outward through the eyes of my mom, my lens on the world became more graceful as a young teen. The challenges of others put my personal, familial, and judicial hardships in perspective.
My family history and its reclamation of a new home, positions me and them within a context where the construction and deconstruction of identities and tensions that occur as a result of adaptation, assimilation and our attempts to accustom ourselves with the notion of alienation has had a profound impact on my work. In my photographs, I reflect on and reimagine scenes from my own personal history: I see images from Ghana and Italy and more recently from America. I incorporate all these visual languages into the images I create. As a once-stateless person who had to learn how to navigate institutions, cultures and languages, my work merges my distinct identities as an African, black, hyper-visible, and invisible man in America.
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