“yes. surrender. bloom. (number 6)” —ORIGINAL (2020)

still thinking and attempting to feel what the saints taught me about surrender. there’s something about the posture of the hand raised in praise that is so invitational and sacred. but i’ve also been thinking about early 20th-c photographs of black men in close intimacies, have been looking at their hands, too, and the placement of their flesh in close proximity as another mode of approaching the kind of radical surrender and welcome and joy that the saints, too, practice. the tenderness, the gentleness, the care. i am not interested in if the men identify as gay, identity is of no concern for me here. i am interested in how their intimacy prompts or, like the saints, quickens imagination towards possibility. bloom. (photographer for the parishioner was very likely Lee Russell, 1941; photographer for the GIs is unknown, if you know more information about it, let me know).