A few years ago (a short while after I started photography), a college friend of mine, Ainehi, while working on her Ph.D. in English at Duke University hired me to photo-document a Novel Project (The Novel Project is a research seminar at the English Department at Duke University) event that she organized. We both went to Morgan State University for our undergraduate studies and coincidentally both ended up in North Carolina years later. Anyways, the event she hired me for was a Question & Answer session with one of my favorite writers of all time, Chimamanda Adichie. I was super elated and did it with excitement.
Afterward, she convinced her boss, Dr. Nancy Armstrong, to hire me 2 more times to document 2 more events. Apparently, typically, her department didn’t care for taking photographs of their events but she loved my documentary style and saw value in documenting events/seminars. Hence, she worked on convincing Dr. Armstrong as much as she could to hire me a couple more times. 🙂 After she graduated last year, I figured my run with her department was done considering that it took her some work to get the department to choose to document their seminars & events.
Almost a year later, to my surprise, I got an email from one of Dr. Armstrong’s students, Justin Mitchell, earlier this year to document another event of theirs – An evening with Colson Whitehead. Colson’s celebrated works include the zombie novel Zone One and the essay collection The Colossus of New York. I was, of course, very excited. Here are some of the photos from the talk:
