Photographing Black Skin With Direction

Canon Canada named me a Top 20 Creator in 2023 and 2024. The recognition was for photography, but the work behind it was almost entirely creative direction.

Most conversations about photographing Black skin focus on technical fundamentals. Lighting ratios, exposure, white balance, post-processing decisions. All of that matters and all of it is solvable. The harder conversation is about direction. What you are actually asking the person in front of the camera to do, and what you are actually trying to capture.

My approach starts with a refusal. I am not interested in typical posing. I am not looking for the standard three-quarter turn, the hand on the hip, the performative smile. Those poses exist to make subjects look like content. I want to make them look like themselves.

That distinction shows up in every direction I give on set. When I am shooting a portrait, I am not choreographing a pose. I am having a conversation and watching for the moments when the person stops performing. The direction I am giving is usually not about the body. It is about attention. Where are they looking. What are they thinking about. What just happened that made their face change.

For Black subjects specifically, this matters more. So much photography of Black people flattens them into aesthetic objects. Beautiful lighting, beautiful skin, zero interior life. The frame treats the subject like a surface. Direction is the tool that prevents that. If I am directing well, the person in front of me is never just a texture. They are a presence.

The technical work supports the direction. I light for skin tones that hold depth. I shoot in formats that preserve detail in darker values. I edit with restraint because most post-processing decisions in mainstream photography are calibrated for lighter skin and flatten everything else. Those choices are important. But they are in service of the direction, not a substitute for it.

On set, the brief is happening in real time. I am not handing someone a mood board and asking them to match it. I am reading what they bring into the room and shaping the shoot around it. A headshot and a portrait are almost the same technically. The difference is entirely about direction. A headshot asks someone to look professional. A portrait asks someone to be themselves while the camera is on.

The Canon recognition came from a body of work that included portraits, headshots, group photography, and event coverage. The thread across all of it was the same. I was directing first and photographing second. The camera was a tool for capturing what the direction produced.

People ask how to get better at photographing Black skin. The technical answers are on YouTube. The better answer is to take the direction more seriously than the lighting. Know who you are photographing. Know what you want them to feel. Make the set a place where that feeling can actually happen. The image will follow.