Photographer | Pan-Africanist | Son

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Tafari Melisizwe is a Black Life photographer and culture work based in Chicago, IL. He has currently has 3 projects in production:

Motherland People a digital platform that explores the lives, experiences, and stories of America’s African-descendant community.

Old, Gifted & Black, an audio/visual quest to gather and transmit the wisdom, strategies and stories global Africa’s greatest resources, our elders.

BSIDES: Improvisational Blackness, a magazine in collaboration with 2Dots: Space

Through photojournalistic-style portrait photography, Melisizwe participates in historical and contemporary relationships between people of African ancestry in an effort to forge meaningful understandings and connections along the continuing lines of language, geography, culture, and history. This work has taken him across the United States, as well as through Ghana, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Cuba and 6 underwhelming hours at the Burkinabe border. While certainly honest, his work is neither neutral nor objective, as he grounds his photography within the social, political, and aspirational tenets of Pan-Africanist praxis. His work presumes the life of black peoples, oft-ignored or obscured from the outset in mainstream discourse. His greatest aspiration through photography is to chronicle Black life as it is, as it unfolds, and to use that as a catalyst for joy, dialogue, inspiration, organizing, and movement work.

Info

Tafari Melisizwe

hello@tafarimelisizwe.com

@theindigenouslens

Publications & Exhibitions

2024: Black Creativity at MSI

2022: Black Boy Journal Vol 1 Issue 1: Rite On!

2021: '‘Black Unity’ Category winner Black Alliance for Peace, The Role of Culture in Resistance and Revolution

2021: ‘Through Shared Black Eyes: An Interview with Tafari Melisizwe’, a gathering together

2020: ‘For Rayshard’ African Lens, Vol 6.

2020: Hapeville Art Trail Exhibition