"Adolescent" in Blue

“Adolescent” in Blue. Taken on an iPhone SE; modified in Photos, Prequel, PhotoRoom, and FaceApp. j. nyla ink mcneill. 2025. Originally published on patreon.com/c/inkmcneill.

j. nyla ink mcneill’s blue self-portrait series uses photography and digital manipulation to explore Blackness, memory, gender, and subcultural belonging through the symbolic and historical language of the color blue. Drawing from books The Trayvon Generation and Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, the works examine how Black identity is shaped through visibility, fear, assimilation, and self-invention across time.

The portraits move between adolescence and adulthood, blending lived memory with imagined reconstruction. In the series, straightened hair functions simultaneously as a marker of survival, social negotiation, and subcultural belonging. By digitally recreating hairstyles and versions of the self that no longer physically exist, mcneill approaches photography as a form of autoethnographic repair rather than straightforward documentation.

Blue operates throughout the work as both atmosphere and archive. It evokes intimacy, mourning, water, surveillance, vintage photography, and the afterlives of anti-Black violence, while also holding space for softness, experimentation, and pleasure. Metal gates, fences, and reflections recur as visual motifs, referencing redlining, containment, and the liminal spaces the artist has inhabited. Across the series, self-portraiture becomes a way of reclaiming memory from systems that attempted to define Black life, gender expression, and cultural belonging from the outside.