Esiri Erheriene-Essi

WePresent - I Want to Bring these People back to Technicolor

• “It’s not as if black people all around the world existed in a vacuum, and just came out in the ‘50s. We’ve been around, but it’s not been documented because it wasn’t deemed important,” she says. “I really wanted to have black people existing on canvas doing everyday things. The banality of that. Not always having to resort to struggle or death or stereotypes. That’s not all our lives are about. There’s also joy, there’s also boring aspects.

• “I always think, what about the everyday people who weren’t the face of the campaign but were still supporting?” she says. “Wearing the badges, donating, turning up at the rallies. I’m fascinated by the people who pushed these histories but weren’t publicised for it. You always get the big shots of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but you rarely get the photos of the people who watched them and cheered for them.”

Juxtapoz - A Most Present Future

• "I was reading James Baldwin a couple of years ago, and I was thinking about all the things he was talking about in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and how it still relates to now. How history is this forcible power that is all around us. It's in our names, it's in our language, it's everywhere. It's there and it does no good to just ignore it—where we come from, and where we are now, and where we're going. There are always things that I can relate to. I'm just really intrigued by that, and that's how I look at history—as this thing that's always within us and everywhere, and something that we can never get away from."