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“We are in imagination battles when we choose to live our own truths,” adrienne maree brown wrote, “We are already imagining the future into existence with every choice we make.”
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, we ask: What is the future we want to see? We invited 15 artists, creatives, thinkers and change makers to answer this question. How does an image you’ve already captured point to a future you want to see?
As a social practice artist, entrepreneur and community builder, I am interested in creating with a community as opposed to for an audience. My earliest social practice projects drew on my massive archive of photographs, which memorialize quiet moments within hectic New York City life that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
In 2000, as a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, I created an archive of all of my photos. I have taken pictures constantly since I was thirteen years old, so by that time in my life, I had over 200,000 photos. I had gotten into the habit of incessant photographing and never stopping to assess what I was taking. I wanted to see what I had been capturing for so many years. During a studio visit, the artist Mike Smith asked me if my archive was an art piece. I was forever changed.
At the time it was unusual for anyone other than a photographer to have that many photos of daily life taken over several decades. Today, though, we all have our own massive archives of photos. We have photographed everything from: food, moods, selfies and mundane scenes we want to remember. These photos exist on our screens and phones.
Go to the photo archive on your phone and scroll through your images.
As you scroll, meditate on the future you want to see. Pay attention to which images stand out to you.
Select an image and write one or two sentences about why you chose this image.
Share your image and words on Instagram with the hashtag #becomingfuture92Y
Tell your friends, so they can take part too.
Stephanie Diamond is an artist, entrepreneur and community builder. She is the founder and CEO of Listings Project, a free weekly newsletter of carefully vetted real estate and opportunity listings geared towards artists and creatives…
Stephanie Diamond is an artist, entrepreneur and community builder. She is the founder and CEO of Listings Project, a free weekly newsletter of carefully vetted real estate and opportunity listings geared towards artists and creatives. She is a 5Rhythms dance teacher and has a photographic memory of every living space she has ever set foot in. She has uncanny sixth sense and her ability to see has been present long before she began working with photographs.
Stephanie's work has been exhibited at MoMA, MASS MoCA, MoMA/P.S. 1, Studio Museum in Harlem, Queens Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Project Row Houses, Philadelphia Mural Arts, SculptureCenter, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, to name a few.
