Joy McKinney

First Glance depicts a Korean woman painting herself black as she walks the streets of New York City. It embraces its full potential by revealing the crowd’s reaction to her ethnic transformation. This series came to me after I created a series of self-transformation photographs that exposed doubts about my self-esteem and cultural identity as a black woman. I felt I needed to further explore the deeply rooted conceptualization of my own identity and transcend it through the transformation of another being into a black person. Each shot is a step further into cultural confusion, reflecting on black people’s social identity, inner conflicts and how other people from a range of ethnic, gender and cultural backgrounds react to it.

http://www.jmckinneyphoto.com/