B Sides Volume 01 - June/July 2022

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B SIDES

IMPROVISATIONAL BLACKNESS

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Greetings!

I’m so very grateful to you for taking the time to see a bit of what I’ve seen. Please reach out and let me know your thoughts! B Sides best embodies my current approach to image-making; improvisational with a dash of unconditional love. Something that is really important for you to know about me, if you want to really see these images, you have to love our people. My people have to be your people - hence ‘our’. It’s a non-negotiable. Got it? Good.

Otherwise, you’ll just look at beautiful images of Black people, and it’d be shameful for you to see so little and miss so much.

See, I love our people.

I love our everydayness, our regular, our ‘on the way to...’ type of blackness.

I love real smiles, real moments, questions, conversations and connections.

Enjoy the images, Tafari Melisizwe

TO THINK ABOUT And I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value. - Aime Cesaire

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But this is now more love letter than introduction, and it’s certainly not no mainifesto. So I’ll let you go. But, if you are really in the market for a manifesto to read, I suggest the New Jewel Movement’s one.

SOMETHING

B SIDES

That’s what I’m after, the photograph is just proof it happened.

IT’S GOOD THAT YOU’RE DOING WHAT YOU’RE DOING. DOCUMENTING BLACK FOLKS. DOCUMENTING THIS OLD SOUTHERN SMILE.

THIS OL’ SOUTHERN SMILE A T L A N TA , G A | A U G U S T 2 0 1 9

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DO NOT FEAR M I S TA K E S .

THERE ARE NONE. - MILES DAVIS

NEM TUDO QUE RE LUZ É OURO, NEM TUDO QUE BALANÇA CAI | CHICAGO, IL | 2021

MS. MARY FROM WHEAT STREET

Y O U K N O W. . .

I GUESS I DON’T LIKE WHITE FOLKS CUZ THEY AINT GIVE ME MUCH TO LIKE.

MS. MARY FROM WHEAT STREET A T L A N TA , G A | 2 0 1 9

Tafari Melisizwe is a freelance photographer based in Chicago, IL. He is currently working on 3 projects, “Motherland People,” a digital platform that explores the lives, experiences, and stories of America’s African-descendant communities.

He’s also producing two long-term archival project “Old, Gifted & Black” and “In These Hands”. Through photojournalistic-style portrait photography, Melisizwe explores historical and contemporary relationships between people of African ancestry in an effort to forge meaningful understandings and connections along the continuing lines of language, geography, culture, and history. This work has taken him across the United States, as well as through Ghana, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Cuba and 6 underwhelming hours at the Burkinabe border. While certainly honest, his work is neither neutral nor objective, as he grounds his photography within the social, political, and aspirational tenets of Pan-Africanist praxis. His work presumes the humanity of black people, oft-ignored or obscured from the outset in mainstream discourse. His greatest aspiration through photography is to present black life as it is, as it unfolds, and to use that as a catalyst for joy,

SPECIAL THANKS TO THE INCREDIBLE ROBERT COOPER JR. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THESE WONDERFUL WEDDING PHOTOS FAM!

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