Introducing Inverted Blackness

A photoblog documenting Africans living in the United States.

Dear Reader,

I am thrilled to invite you to subscribe to my photoblog, Inverted Blackness, a photography project documenting Africans living in the United States of America.

Beginning in May 2025, I’ll be publishing a curated selection of photographs of African immigrants and non-immigrants I meet here in the United States. Each selection of photographs will be accompanied by a brief, personal story that offers a glimpse into their journey since living here. I hope you’ll enjoy these stories as much as I do.

“Inverted Blackness” started out as an artistic concept I devised in the course of my MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design. It refers to the evolving identity and sense of otherness of the African immigrant/non-immigrant navigating a new cultural terrain in the United States. This process of acculturation leads to major changes in the identity of the immigrant individual. Through photography and storytelling, Inverted Blackness: The Photoblog attempts to capture those changes.

As a visual artist, I have made paintings regarding this subject in the past. My paintings are characterized by immigrant and non-immigrant individuals from Africa, their bodies painted in luminous blue photo-negative, to visualize their changing identities. In Fall 2024, my solo exhibition, “Inverted Blackness,” opened at AFIKARIS Gallery in Paris, France. The show was accompanied by my first artist book, Inverted Blackness, published by AFIKARIS Press. Moving forward, this photoblog will be an addition to the diverse ways through which African immigrant life in America is documented, celebrated, and shared, in my practice.

I invite you to read, subscribe, and invite others. The blog is free.

If you’re an African immigrant or non-immigrant and want to be featured on my blog, please click this link to fill a contact form, or send me a message:

With gratitude,

Boluwatife Oyediran.