The Brooklyn Rail

Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive lifts its title from graffiti the photographer once spotted while looking out the window of an Uber. “It stuck with me because I feel like children are naturally curious,” Bobb-Willis explains of her modus operandi of channeling youthfulness. Published by Aperture with silver-tipped pages, it’s her first monograph—although her work was included in the compendium The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (also published by Aperture) and the accompanying traveling exhibition. Keep the Kid Alive gathers her ebullient hybrid fashion/photography portfolio, in which she mostly casts her subjects and styles the shoots herself (some images were commissioned, however, for the likes of Acne and Vanity Fair). Pulling from the pleasures of imagination, she reframes young Black figuration and delights in a new graphic vocabulary.

Of the 108 photos, many present pliant, almost gymnastic silhouettes: arched backs and curved torsos, outstretched balletic arms and upturned chins, bent knees and curtains of hair, standing alone or in intertwined pairings. Facelessness is a kind of recurrent hide-and-go-seek, timid more than coy, the older version of hiding behind your mother’s leg. In an essay by scholar Tiana Reid, she praises the “flourishes and rainbowscapes” of Bobb-Willis’s output, “this romance toward living and creating.” The cover image (Daquan Jeremy photographed in New Jersey in 2017) features a young Black figure with yellow hair against a purple backdrop, sporting an emerald crushed velvet shirt, an azure blue tank, and an orange bag. The sartorial ensemble provides a matching color scheme to the mask of popsicle sticks used to overwrite his face. Elsewhere, a swimming-pool-blue jacket is worn askew off the shoulder of a model with his back to us, his other shoulder naked and sculptural; in a more cropped image of a girl seen from behind, the rippling mint green neckline delicately offsets the geometry of the model’s braids. One of the most child-like images is a model with two large bubbles floating in front of his eyes like warped glasses, a magical game of pretend, the frolicsome juvenilia of seeing.

There are two “disruptions” amidst the images: a smaller booklet, featuring fabrics, facades, and face paint; and sherbet orange pages of interviews, led by Bobb-Willis herself, with fourteen creatives about keeping their inner kid alive. Not all of the conversations are interesting, but Bobb-Willis reveals some telling nuggets about her own practice while exchanging with others. “Everything that I know about taking pictures has nothing to do with photography—meaning everything I’ve created didn't happen because I use a Nikon N80,” Bobb-Willis states. “When you’re painting, you can make someone’s head a foot,” she notes. “There are unlimited things you could do with the body in paintings, and I love that freedom. I’m trying to put that freedom in my photos.”

Given this, the overall effect of the book is one of zesty experimentation and, unsurprisingly, Bobb-Willis never takes items she encounters at face value. “I’ve changed shirts into skirts and cut out holes into the shirt. Or I’ll stretch a shirt out so that I can put two people in it. I put a lot of people in shirts backward and inside out. A skirt doesn’t have to be a skirt just because it’s presented that way. It could be whatever you want it to be.”

Bobb-Willis also talks about becoming an older sister at fourteen, and how engaging with her siblings by being “silly, running around and dancing,” allowed her to “get into that zone” of being giddily puerile and using whatever is at hand. Editor Nicole Acheampong remarks: “The clothes that your models wear tend to look unbranded and anonymous,” highlighting Bobb-Willis’s ability to get inventive—transformative—without the signifiers and labels adults are so used to flagging and decoding. Similarly, although she shoots on the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles, the locations feel completely placeless, without any identifiable urban tokenism.

Sometimes Bobb-Willis creates a wonderful sense of harmony between her models and their environs: a head of pink-and-blue braids echo the hues of blossoms from a tree and the Los Angeles sky, or a green shirt matches a green parking meter sticker, affirming a broader resonance between humanity and locality. There’s a two-page spread of Lil Nas X in a head-to-toe patent leather parking-cone-orange look. Bathed in afternoon light against a blue wall in Los Angeles, he’s a new wave cowboy, his face obscured by his tipped-forward hat. A red car edging its way into the shot reinforces the outfit’s brightness. In classic Bobb-Willis form, it is radiant and striking.