Joshua Rashaad McFadden: I Believe I'll Run On
Contributions by LaCharles Ward, Joshua Rashaad McFadden, and Lyle Ashton Harris
Imprint: George Eastman Museum, Yale University Press, 2022
A comprehensive survey of the photography of rising and influential Black artist Joshua Rashaad McFadden
American artist Joshua Rashaad McFadden (b. 1990) makes photographs that explore and celebrate Black life in the United States. Published in conjunction with his first solo museum exhibition, Joshua Rashaad McFadden: I Believe I’ll Run On demonstrates his mastery of a wide range of photographic genres—social documentary, reportage, portraiture, and fine art—and his use of the medium to confront racism and anti-Black violence. Like Black photographers before him, such as Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, McFadden documents the beauty of Black life and illuminates the specificity of Black living in our historical present, including a series of impactful photographs devoted to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Along with a candid conversation between McFadden and artist Lyle Ashton Harris and an essay that traces McFadden’s meteoric career, this catalogue offers an overview of and insight into a poignant and deeply personal body of work, asserting McFadden’s key role in shaping the art and visual culture of the United States.
Come to Selfhood
by Joshua Rashaad McFadden, Contribution by Lyle Ashton Harris
Publisher: ceiba Editions, 2016
Far too often African American men live and identify with an idea of “blackness” that is imposed upon them, rather than created by them. Their sense of self-worth and identity has primarily been defined by external forces. What happens when an African American man self interprets his own identity based upon ideology, reality, memory, and experience? This body of work is confronting the issue of how an African American male “comes to” a sense of agency or “Selfhood” within a dominant culture that does not fully support the physical, physiological, and spiritual growth and well-being of African Americans. Composed of two components, this series explores and examines the qualities that constitute one’s individuality