Artist, Lola Flash: I was photographing my community, and I wanted them to understand that they were just as important as I am, and so after I photographed my models, I would often ask them to photograph me, maybe just to give them the sense of like, we're in community, we're collaborating. This self-portrait photograph, which I often call Me and My Big Business, was definitely after a photo shoot. I remember it was a really steamy photo shoot. I had my ‘big business’ with me, and so I asked them to photograph me.
I feel like I was working towards creating this archive of the new queer. Sometimes I'll Google “Black and brown lesbians” and see what comes up, and there's still a lack of images of us looking beautiful, or relaxing, sitting by a pool, or hanging out in Central Park or something. There still is a lack of us being human beings. I really just wanted to make these very kind of direct images of my communities, so that when I'm long gone, people will say, “Oh, there were beautiful queer people. There were beautiful Black people.”
Cross-color is the process where I'm inverting all the colors. One of the things about cross-color that's interesting is there's a blur around the race of a person, but there's also a blur around the gender. Your biases have to fall behind, because you're just looking at a human.