B Sides Volume 03 - September/October 2022

N03 $22.00

B SIDES

IMPROVISATIONAL BLACKNESS

SEPT/OC T 2 02 2

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.

Enjoy the images, Tafari Melisizwe

SOMETHING

B SIDES

No one checks the depth of the river with both feet.

-Afrikan Proverb

SEPT/OCT 2022

TO THINK ABOUT

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,

N04

NOV/DEC 2 02 2