Tara Pixley

Brynne is 12 years old now, just beginning to navigate her own body and think about its boundaries, needs and future. Brynne comes of age now in a country that values control over freedom, a nation that has reverted its rationales on bodily autonomy ensconced in the abolition of slavery. Brynne is Black, brown-skinned, and femme. She is second-generation Jamaican and descended from Pequot Tribal Nation. Brynne is my daughter.

It's her I think of when I imagine a future unmoored from ownership of our femme bodies. It's her who will have her choices constrained, her body policed, her world made terrifying. It's her in this image, at 10, looking defiantly into a future she can still only imagine in broad strokes as she holds her arms around her growing body.

Bio

Tara Pixley, Ph.D. (b. 1983) is a queer, Jamaican-American photographer, filmmaker, and professor based in Los Angeles. Her award-winning photography and film reimagines race, gender, LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities through a liberation lens. Her work as a photojournalist has taken her from the ships of eco-pirates to the U.S. presidential campaign trail and her writing and photography have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, Allure, Hollywood Reporter, People Magazine, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, and ESPN, among many others. She is a 2022 Reynolds Journalism Fellow and 2022 Pulitzer Center Grantee, a 2021 IWMF NextGen Fellow, a 2020 awardee of the World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative and a 2016 Visiting Knight Fellow at Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Tara is on the Board of the National Press Photographers Association and is a Board Member for Stocksy.