Photographer Naima Green is creating an archive of queer representation
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Closeness, desire and safety are layered through the work of Naima Green, a queer artist and educator based in New York City. Her work often invites participation, and her portraiture is an archive of representation. Deep observation and intimacy are core to her process.
“I am really invested in intimacy and always wanting to get really close to something and hold it delicately,” Green said. “It can be a person, an environment, an idea.”
Green’s work includes “Pur·suit,” a deck of playing cards featuring photographs of queer people, inspired by Catherine Opie’s “Dyke Deck,” a time capsule of Bay Area lesbian life in the 1990s. Over the pandemic, Green was at work on “Skin Contact,” a personal archive that considers the small things that could be forgotten, like, “What was on your grocery list from March 7? May 17?” Green’s ongoing archival project, “Jewels From the Hinterland,” features Black and brown people in urban green spaces.
Green has said of the project: “I wanted these photographs to assert and insert our presence in these tranquil landscapes, to interrupt the predominant narratives about people of color surrounded by urban decay. Beauty here is an entry point — it makes us stop and look, but it isn’t the whole story.”
Check back later this month for our full profile of Naima Green.
