NOMINATED BY BUCK ELLISON
29—New York
Recognized as a promising young talent by Dior and Aperture, Ashley McLean is entering the second year of her MFA program at Columbia with a steadily growing list of admirers for her intimate, introspective portraiture.
“I’ve learned through making portraits that the poetics of a [subject] is 50 percent of the work. So creating the right conditions for them to surrender into themselves is ideal. For me, it resists this culture of urgency we’re in today. What’s this person’s interior life? Is it loud? Quiet? What is this a residue of, whether scene, site, or person? What’s left behind? I ask these questions because photography can flatten, and I’m constantly obsessing over ways to counter that.
Dignification and precarity are the two modalities that Black bodies often occupy in photographs. At a time when the art world obsesses over utopia, I’m asking what fragility looks like alongside beauty. At the start of summer, I returned to my family’s homeland, Guyana, to spend time with my grandparents and make work about homecoming.
There was a night scene that haunted me for days, so I returned to photograph it. When I got back to New York, the negative was almost black. I was really bummed because I thought it would be ‘the one.’ But that experience isn’t lost just because it it’s not on film. It’s so imprinted in my memory that it holds as much value as it would on my contact sheet.”
in your life?
