CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/6/2024

“For anyone who has ever felt uncomfortable in their own skin,” Joshua Amissah presents ‘Black Masculinities’

Featured photograph, by NYC- and Atlanta-based filmmaker and photographer Braylen Dion, is from Black History Month staff pick Black Masculinities: Creating Emotive Utopias through Photography. Featuring work by 22 international photographers, this 320-page hardcover explodes clichés that have been "sugarcoated with ‘coolness,’” according to editor Joshua Amissah. “Unfortunately, the big portion of ‘coolness’ usually does not keep its promise and reveals a bittersweet aftertaste. Once this sugarcoat is deconstructed, the representation of Black men in popular culture exposes its bitter core of attributions such as aggression, hypersexuality, toxic masculinity, class struggle and criminal tendencies.…” The photographers in this book, including Dion, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Kwaku Alston, Kofi Duah, Jabari Jacobs, Isaac West and Ussi’n Yala, among others, “are forming a youthful and liberatory vision based in and around the figures of Black men. Their extraordinary works offer new ways of seeing, imagining and also experiencing Black masculinities, whose cultural meanings are not only full of talent, but also unapologetically reclaiming, brilliant, courageous, thoughtful, decolonizing, captivating, pioneering and absolutely game-changing."