Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (b. 1993, Baldwin, New York) is an artist, photographer, and educator currently based in Brooklyn, New York. In his personal practice, he uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Occasionally the work turns away from standard archival prints to examine photography as a sculptural, redactive, and site-specific process.
I photographed this Jack in the Box in Los Angeles as part of a project, in progress, that illustrates a night as described by Alan Bell’s Black Jack Newsletter. The newsletter announced a roving, monthly safe sex club party for Black gay men, which lasted from 1986 through 1989. Newcomers, known as “Green Members,” would meet Black Jack staff at fast-food restaurants throughout Los Angeles to receive that night’s address; in a cruising culture lacking the casualness with which it can take place today, this was an opportunity for each party goer to vet each other.
