Brooklyn-based photographer Chris Cook documents the Black Lives Matter protests with new exhibition, “AM I NEXT?”
Chris Cook creates historical archives through photography. After the murder of George Floyd, the 28-year-old photographer from Brooklyn joined the BLM protests, producing 180 photographs in the process. 15 of these have been carefully selected for his solo exhibition, “AM I NEXT?”, connecting the present with America’s turbulent past.
“I felt it was my duty to document the BLM movement”, Cook told Highsnobiety, “it represents the Black historic moment within my timeline, which connects me to my ancestors.”
The show covers the vast and complex nature of the protest movement, capturing fleeting moments of pride, anger, community, and everything in between.
Cook has been following the BLM movement since 2017. He remembers the first day of the George Floyd protests,
“it was very hectic, it started off peaceful then cops got more violent and started arresting people, and there were a lot of different groups with different agendas.”
Things changed when the photographer noticed that the media wasn’t telling the whole story,
“I remember I was looking through a new channel and it was like day afterwards. And one thing I noticed that there was a particular video clip, a bird’s eye view. I saw the whole thing happened and I was like, wait, they cut out different parts of it. This isn’t the full story. And that was a light bulb moment.”
AM I NEXT? : Friday, February 13– April 10, 2021
Welancora Gallery, 33 Herkimer Street, Brooklyn, New York.
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