The photo show: NPR

Using fluorescent body paint and ultraviolet light, the latest work by photographer Mikael Owunna aims to transform the black body into "cosmos and eternal". The images evoke celestial beings, magical and from another world.

But the concept of the project, Infinite Essence, was created by frustration and exhaustion.

The 28-year-old Nigerian-Swedish photographer, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and currently living there, says he is tired of the flow of violent, dehumanizing black images he has seen in the media.

"Dead and dying blacks, shot dead by policemen, drowned and washed on the shores of the Mediterranean, starving and suffering from award-winning photographs, the trope of the black body as a place of death. omnipresent "says in his statement of artist.

For Owunna, the latest provocation came in 2014: see photos of Michael Brown's body lying on the street after his assassination by Darren Wilson, a white policeman at Ferguson, Mo. The picture was widespread in the media, even going up to the first page. of The New York Times.

"If the majority of the images you see of yourself are negative," says Owunna, "if people like you are dead or dying or captured in a negative light, how do these images penetrate your body?"

Owunna wanted to counter the pain of these photos, create images showing the black body not as a site of death, but as a site of magic.

The name of Owunna's project is inspired by Chinua Achebe's writings on traditional Igbo spirituality, its supreme deity, Chukwu, and the concept of chi, the spiritual guide found in each person: "Is that chi an infinitesimal manifestation of Chukwu infinite essence given to each of us separately and uniquely, a single ray of the unlimited radiance of the sun? "Achebe writes in his essay," Chi in Igbo Cosmology ".

Owunna elaborates.

"Each of our minds is only a ray of the infinite essence of the sun. And in my photographs, [I’m] "How can I capture a piece or fragment or shadow in this land of magic?" That's what I base the project on and that's what I capture, the spiritual guide of the individual models. "

Owunna was inspired by a painful season of his past. In his teens, he felt isolated and intimidated for acting as a fag at the Ohio boarding school he attended. The fantasy helped him cope.

"I would catapult myself into these magical lands that would be captured in Japanese cartoons, video games or fantasy novels," he says. "So, for me, magic was this world of escape."

(One of Owunna's previous projects, Limit (less), describes a diaspora of homosexual Africans.)

"I went back to [anime] Videos that had inspired me in my childhood, videos of magic being formed and sparks from the body, "he explains.His goal was to find a way to embody the Eternal – represented by these sparks – through photography.

He found the solution in fluorescent body paint, the type that people could use for a party in black light. The painting being barely visible in normal light, Owunna had to find a way to make it appear on her pictures.

Engineering student at the university, Owunna used this knowledge to increase the flash of a camera so that it only transmits frequencies of ultraviolet light. Thus, when his subjects are covered with paint and photographed in the dark, the fluorescent colors are illuminated and made visible by the ultraviolet light emitted by the flash.

The models seem to be wrapped in stars.

The fact that ultraviolet light allows us to see these vibrant colors reflects broader themes in his work – as Owunna writes in his artist statement, "whatever our experiences of oppression on the physical plane, we are infinite, as infinite as the universe, and the dust of stars that forms each fiber of our beings ".

"In the visible spectrum, we have racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia," says Owunna. "But if I look into the UV spectrum, which exceeds the understanding of the human eye, the black body is a magic site."

At first, Owunna's subjects were friends and family members. Now, two years into the project, strangers often contact him to ask him to include him.

The process is intimate and requires trust. Owunna allows people to choose the colors that speak to them. Then he paints their body with almost invisible paint, which takes about an hour. In total, the sessions last about five hours.

"It takes so much time that they get used to being naked in front of me," he says. "It's intimate for sure."

The poses are collaborative and result from a conversation between the photographer and the model, but Owunna revolves around certain themes. For example, with men, he wants to show tenderness, "because masculinity is never really assimilated to tenderness".

"It's a good job for them to get emotional, to open up to that," he says.

Owunna prints the final images on aluminum, a nod to the tradition of West African metallurgy and a link between the models and their ancestors. The subjects are reflected in the room, favoring a transgenerational conversation. He also chose the metal because, even though it seems solid, it is fragile and easy to bend – a tribute to the lives of black children killed by forces of order, such as Tamir Rice, Stanley-Jones Aiyana, Trayvon Martin and Antwon Rose Jr.

Through this project, Owunna hopes to transform not only the bodies of those he photographs, but also those of see his work.

"I dream of creating exhibition spaces where people can come in, especially black people, where they can feel affirmed and transformed," he said.

"They come in and their posture changes," says Owunna. "They take a deeper breath, their shoulders fall, their heads a little higher, and that's something they're moving away from."

He remembers the reaction of one of his models when they saw themselves in Owunna 's photo: "Wow, all my life, I have dreamed of being adorned with… 39, stars, and that's more than I've ever dreamed of. Every black person deserves to see himself that way. "

Mikael Owunna is a photographer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was recently rewarded a $ 20,000 grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council to finish Infinite Essence. See more of Owunna's work on his Instagram.