"Adolescent" in Black

“Adolescent” in Black. 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 self-portrait series “Adolescent” in Blue and Black uses photography and digital manipulation to explore Blackness, memory, gender, and subcultural belonging through the symbolic and historical language of color. The works examine how Black identity is often 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.

Black operates throughout the work as both atmosphere and erasure. It evokes intimacy, mourning, the unknown, evading surveillance, the vintage pinhole photography of Black archives, and the afterlives of anti-Black violence, while also holding space for softness, experimentation, and pleasure. Across the series, self-portraiture becomes a way of reclaiming memory from systems that attempted to define their Black life, expression, and cultural belonging from the outside.