Chinelle Rojas has been a self portrait photographer, among other niche specialties like birth and boudoir, since 2010, and logo designer who loves to challenge her creativity with her personal work with her passion project “My Black Self” when she isn’t helping her fellow entrepreneurs make a magical first impression. Chinelle has dreams of being a world traveler alongside her family. Speaking of family, she is a wife and homeschooling (before COVID) mother of three creative souls.
Read More
The Candid Frame #527 - Polly Irungu
Multimedia journalist, digital editor, and self-taught photographer Polly Irungu is the founder of Black Women Photographers, a global community and online database of Black women and non-binary photographers.
Polly is a Digital Content Editor at New York Public Radio (WYNC), where she is responsible for managing social media for WNYC and PRX’s ‘The Takeaway’, a national NPR show with over 2 million listeners, pitching news stories and features for The Takeaway and her podcast is ranked the 4th most downloaded, amongst others.
Read More
photo: Cheriss May
The Candid Frame #518 - Cheriss May & Idris T. Solomon
Cheriss May is a visual storyteller and adjunct professor at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington D.C. She is the president of Women Photojournalists of Washington (WPOW), and co-chair of the photography committee at The National Press Club.
Idris Talib Solomon is a photojournalist and portrait photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2016, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to photograph Hip Hop culture in Ghana. He is also the host and producer of the Black Shutter podcast.
Read More
The Candid Frame #494 - Robert Hale
Robert Hale is one of the West Coast’s leading photographers. His work both as a photographer and as a journalist has taken him on assignment throughout the world. His images are characterized by clarity and simplicity, with an extraordinary eye for light and shadow. Whether animate or inanimate, Robert feels his subjects have an inner essence, and, if handled with patience and sensitivity, this essence will reveal itself. His goal is to allow it to live in prints.
Read More
The Candid Frame #478 - Sheila Pree Bright
Sheila Pree Bright is often described as a "Cultural Anthropologist. Her earliest experience as a photographer began when she spent time in Houston where she began photographing the gangsta rap scene and confronting the dynamic between Hip hop and gun culture. In 2003, she created her MFA thesis photo series, Plastic Bodies, which would later be featured in the film Through the Lens Darkly and go viral on Huffington Post in 2013.
Read More
The Candid Frame #447 - Endia Beal
Endia Beal is a North Carolina based artist, who is internationally known for her photographic narratives and video testimonies that examine the personal, yet contemporary stories of marginalized communities and individuals. Beal currently serves as the Director of Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University and Associate Professor of Art.
Read More
The Candid Frame #436 - Gerald Cyrus
Gerald Cyrus was born in 1957 in Los Angeles, CA and began photographing there in 1984. In 1990 he moved to New York City and obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 1992. While at SVA, he also interned at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture under the supervision of Deborah Willis. During his time in New York, Cyrus photographed regularly on the streets of Manhattan, Harlem and Brooklyn, and in 1994, he started frequenting the nightclubs in Harlem and photographed the vibrant music scene in that historic neighborhood for over six years. The resulting body of work, entitled “Stormy Monday”, was published as a book in 2008.
Read More
The Candid Frame #422 - Nydia Blas
Nydia Blas is a visual artist living in Ithaca, New York with her two children. She holds a B.S. from Ithaca College and received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in the School of Visual and Performing Arts. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Southside Community Center, a historically Black community center in downtown Ithaca. She uses photography, collage, video, and books to address matters of sexuality, intimacy, and she lived experience as a girl, woman, and mother. Blas delicately weaves stories concerning circumstance, value, and power and uses her work to create a physical and allegorical space presented through a Black feminine lens. The result is an environment that is dependent upon the belief that in order to maintain resiliency, a magical outlook is necessary.
Read More
Photo: Alex D. Rogers
The Candid Frame #420 - Alex D. Rogers
Alex D Rogers is an Atlanta-based portrait photographer who is gaining a reputation as an exceptional talent for photographing musicians and artists. He brings a unique and personal eye to photographing both men and women, whether the photographs are editorial, commercial or part of a personal project.
Read More
Photo: Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin
The Candid Frame #404 - Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin
Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin (b. 1977) is a Los Angeles based photographer whose work focuses on the urban environment and how a neighborhoods physical composition reflects the lives of it’s inhabitants. He is best known for The Los Angeles Recordings, an ongoing documentary project comprised of photo essays about L.A.’s rapidly changing urban landscape. He has also recently collaborated with KCET in the creation of In Plain Sight, a series photographing locations of police violence and was one of Time Magazine’s 12 African American Photographers to Follow in 2017.
Read More
Photo: Bryan Shih
The Candid Frame #367 - Bryan Shih
Bryan Shih is a photojournalist and former contributor to the Financial Times and National Public Radio in Japan. He has a masters degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and was a Fulbright Scholar in Japan. His work on the Black Panthers led to his selection for the New York Times inaugural portfolio review in 2013 and garnered one of the highest rankings among entries in the LensCulture 2015 Portrait Awards competition.
Read More
Photo: Kawai Matthews
The Candid Frame #357 - Kawai Matthews
Kawai Matthews is an internationally published and award-winning photographer specializing in portraiture for editorial, entertainment marketing & advertising. Her ability to capture the depth of a subject, while delivering quality, awe-inspiring imagery is uncanny and unmatched. Shooting unforgettable moments of flair, confidence, substance and honesty in her subjects, her heavyweight portfolio includes some of today’s most celebrated entertainers.
Read More
Photo: Ali Leroi
The Candid Frame #356 - Ali LeRoi
Ali LeRoi is a photographer as well as the Emmy Award-winning co-creator/executive producer/writer of the critically acclaimed comedy “Everybody Hates Chris,” a series inspired by the childhood experiences of comedian Chris Rock. He is a Golden Globe nominee, a 2007 NAACP Image Award winner for best writer in a comedy series, as well as a winner of the 2007 AFI TV Program of the Year Award.
Read More
Photo: Russell Frederick
The Candid Frame #351 - Russell Frederick
Russell Frederick is a photographer from Brooklyn, New York whose global world view and compassion for the human condition informs his work.
He produces his photographs primarily with medium format black and white film. For years, he has been documenting the people of the community of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Read More
photo: Shawn Theodore
The Candid Frame #293 - Shawn Theodore aka @_xST
A great street portrait is more than just a photograph of a stranger. In many ways that person being photographed and the photographer enter a collaboration. The subject is choosing to open themselves to being revealed and interpreted by the photographer. And the photographer, if he’s adept enough, is communicating what they find fascinating and beautiful about that subject. And in the hands of a really good photographer, they reveal something about the community and the culture they exist in.
Read More
photo: Jamel Shabazz
The Candid Frame #257 - Jamel Shabazz
Jamel Shabazz has been documenting the ‘Urban Life’ for over 30 years. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY he picked up his first camera at the age of 15 and proceeded to record the world around him. Jamel has drawn inspiration from the great James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, Chester Higgins and Eli Reed.
Read More