Since 2010, Theodore has been making photographs on the streets and in the homes of African American neighborhoods. Following the rich traditions of photographic improvisational style, his artistry endeavors to inform the viewer on how the people and places of Blackness are remembered.
This series stands on its own as a snapshot of a uniquely African American demographic. African Americans face significant contestations over space, place, memory, and history. They are not only historically excluded from physical spaces, but they are also very frequently left out of spaces in America’s historical memorialization. His photographic work explores the ties that bind innumerable Black experiences into new archives. Those in predominantly African American working-class urban communities continue to undergo significant change in the face of post-segregation urban life.
Theodore’s documentation captures many generations, from individuals who came of age in the wake of progress made by the civil rights movement, to those who survived the Covid-19 pandemic, and whose voices have not been silenced during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. These visions of Blackness are whole, enduring, robust, intense, and deliberate. His photographs conjure beauty as history, memory, and resistance while celebrating individuals and communities alike.
Theodore’s work realizes an artfully driven blend of street and studio techniques. With regard to his manner of engaging the public, he has always found his subjects in chance encounters. Some of these interactions between strangers have evolved into sustained collaborations, the fruits of which are presented in his other, primarily conceptual, bodies of work. Theodore states that his desire for creating images in this spontaneous manner has the best potential for self-representation of the subject and engenders diverse imaginations of subjectivity. He utilizes silhouettes to shapeshift candid photography into a self-described form of self-portraiture, which in turn extends his photographic visions into the realms of spirituality and community.
Similar to his astute fore bearers Dawoud Bey and Jamel Shabazz, Theodore works to capture time in the beauty of small moments of individuals and in captivating paradigm shifts of culture. Stylistically, Theodore calls inspiration from Roy DeCarava and Louis Draper, the two influences are, as Theodore describes them ‘as voices that rise and drop in call and response, Black bodies are the notes in and out of the rhythm of light and shadow’.
This series explores issues of identity and belonging and outlines how this demographic of African Americans seek to identify themselves in a society that considers them. His tough-but-tender youngsters, the effortless élan of church folks, smooth-as-silk hustlers, possible pariahs, those who could be haint or saint bending the corners of well-worn avenues, all of them stand in defiance of a monolithic, easily stereotyped description of Blackness. This constellation of identities, their relationships, and the multidisciplinary practice it sustains are at the core of Theodore’s work. While moving across a stylistic continuum—reportage, editorial, and portraiture, Theodore’s work is defiant and not just in regards to labels, but the regime of images that deny Blackness its nuance and depth.
There’s a certain amount of self-determination involved in all of this, and a certain amount of fluidity. Theodore challenges himself to serve multiple identities with his sense of style while acknowledging the subject’s agency and expressions of their identities. Theodore’s compositions engage and intrigue the viewer, and the images speak for themselves in their own idioms and body language.
Theodore’s exploration of Black communities has allowed him to operate like a storyteller, conjuring shadow and light, line, and color. Some photographs open up, radiant before the eye. Others require more of the viewer, like flowers in their earliest bloom. He relishes the many ways that natural light can caress the skin of his Afro-Diasporic subjects, from a flattening glare to dapples and highlights that dance across the face to dramatic shadows and silhouettes that all but obfuscate the body. As in the restrained masterworks of DeCarava, even the darkest blacks of Theodore’s images give way to nuanced tonalities upon sustained contemplation—for instance, the men and women who turn away from the camera and into the shadows, granting the viewer only the silhouette of their three-quarter profile.
Complementary to the intimacy and quiet darkness of many of these photographs, a strand of romantic, performative exuberance shines through. Theodore’s gaze lingers on the elegantly understated, trans-diasporic fashions in his view, often commanding as much attention as the people themselves. Evoking a saturated palette and an understanding of dynamic surrealism, these photographs capture clothing imbued with the soul of Black bodies in motion without sacrificing an ounce of their exquisite compositeness. His self-possessed subjects enact the language of fashion spreads, historical paintings, street performances, and mystical rites, often simultaneously.
Theodore concentrates on what his personal experiences have provided him. In his other works, we find Black fantasy conjured from an ongoing existential conversation with a speculative African American spirituality that he calls Afromythology, a pathway inward and outward, intent on dispersing false binaries that trap the worthiness of radical Black myth-making. (statement needed) close these gaps in our understanding of history by re-assessing the way events are represented in photography. In all of his works, he promotes the creation of a more comprehensive archive by ensuring these real and created moments are not isolated from one another.