Public Bodies

Project Overview

Sensi and BBC (Public Bodies) are two interlinked photographic series exploring the construction, and consumption of Black male sexuality in the West.

These projects interrogate how Black masculinity has been mythologised through pornography, popular media, and centuries of racial fantasy - and how those myths continue to shape the ways Black men are seen. These narratives become scripts that continue to influence everyday performances of identity, from the private spaces of intimacy to the public stage of celebration.

Across both series, the Black male body becomes both subject and object - eroticised and politicised. Together, Sensi and BBC examine what happens when that body is made visible on its own terms, complicating the gaze, reclaiming pleasure, and exposing the thin line between performance and personhood.

Sensi Photography Project

“Sensi" is an exploration of taboos and fantasies associated with Black male sexuality and Black masculinity in Western culture through the stories of a real life escort

Black Africans entered this new world where sadomasochistic rituals of dominance, power and play were already embedded in the fabric of sexuality. Domination became synonymous with black masculinity and permeated society's perception of it, being reinforced from one generation to the next. This notion of black masculinity has become embedded in the Western idea of it and has come to influence how black males themselves see their own sexuality and how they express it. 

This culture, fuelled by the mainstream media, has made black male sexuality (and the black penis) both a curiosity and a taboo. Black males having multiple female partners is perceived, promoted and accepted to be the norm -all of these stories fan the flames of sexual fantasies.

Interracial pornography - featuring performers of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, uses stereotype in its depiction of performers. The majority of Interracial movies are black male / white female.A cursory glance at cuckolding websites will show you the same dynamic repeated over and over again - white husband, white wife and African-American man, or 'mandingo' / 'bull' in cuck slang. 

Sensi (the escort) provides for both women and couples. The scenes in the monograph are reconstructions from his work, and interpreted by myself.

Some of the female performers are sex workers, whilst the others have no connection with the sex industry. All consented to be included in this project.

BBC: Black. Body. Construct.

BBC: Black. Body Construct." explores how Black men have navigated, negotiated, and at times embraced the hypersexualised image projected onto them.

Since slavery and colonialism, the Black male body has been positioned as spectacle - desired, feared, and fetishised. In the modern West, this history echoes through everyday spaces: festivals, nightclubs, carnival routes. These are environments where Black men, more than any other group, often inhabit the role expected of them - revealing their bodies, flirting, dancing, performing their masculinity which has been shaped by societal projection.

The images in Black. Body. Construct. are documentary in style but sociological in intent. They capture fleeting moments of bodily self-expression that blur the lines between stereotype and agency. They reveal how public visibility can be both freedom and trap.

This extension of Sensi does not attempt to moralise or censor. It continues the investigation into Black masculinity by shifting the focus from private reconstructions to real life