ANTONIO MCAFEE
Photo: Micheal Trueblood
Antonio McAfee
The Visionary, 2017
The Visionary (Profile), 2017
Young Man Through the Layers, 2017
Young Man Through the Layers (Profile), 2017
banner
30” x 45"
Antonio McAfee is a photographer who lives and works in Baltimore. He received his BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. McAfee earned his MFA in Photography from the University of Pennsylvania and Post-Graduate Diploma in Art in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand.
His most recent work involves the appropriation and manipulation of historical photographs to address the complexity of representation. These portraits are from The Exhibition of American Negroes organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and Thomas Calloway for the 1900 Paris International Exposition. The exhibition was a photographic, economic, and legislative survey of middle-class blacks in Georgia and part of a national black strategy for countering disparaging racial and class representations of African Americans at home and abroad.
Each portrait undergoes a process that creates fantastical interpretations of the bodies, which appear to oscillate between formal considerations of the portrait and the imaginary potential of the photographed sitter. The new image is a point of departure for questioning the ideas and stories that validate cultural stereotypes.