This body of work is the first set of photographs of an ongoing series my little brother titled The Boy. His entire life, I have called him “the boy” because he was one of the few we have in our family. As a sibling, you develop a personal connection with your younger siblings because your role is to take care of them while watching them grow. Being away from home has made that difficult. This work is essential to me because it allowed me to learn a little more about him in a span of a couple of weeks. This was more than just taking photos.

One of the most meaningful things I learned about him from this project was his knowledge of being a “brown boy”. Not knowing too much about his language arts skills and understanding, I asked him to write down words that describe him. He immediately replies with “like adjectives”?’” I told him yes and he begins to write. After giving him some time, I looked up to see he drew a web with his name in the middle. At the time, it didn’t really shock me to see him struggling to come up with words, but considering I had not told him the concept for the photo project, the first three words he wrote down somewhat shocked me: brown, fun, and boy. In that order.

The web did just as much for this series as the photographs did. Now I know he probably does not know the extent of what it is like to be an innocent “brown boy” in this crazy world, but I’m glad that he is smart enough and self-aware that he is indeed “brown” or African American and a young growing boy that is 100% fun, smart, nice, playful and so many more things that make him the amazing little boy he is.