Color, movement, and sweeping, expertly choreographed gestures permeate the works of Arielle Bobb-Willis. The Los Angeles-based photographer blurs the boundaries between art and fashion imagery, rejecting “the notion that Black expression is limited—or limiting.”
A slim monograph collects 90 of Bobb-Willis’s photos, highlighting her distinctive eye and bold, conceptual compositions. Published by Aperture, Keep the Kid Alive positions observation and imagination as useful tools to inspire awe for the overlooked. Models dressed in bright, color-blocked garments pose in parks or alleyways, their joyful dances and chromatic clothing enriching the nondescript spaces.
Bobb-Willis first picked up a camera at 14 and through moves from New York to Aiken, South Carolina, to New Orleans, found the medium was both cathartic through chronic depression and loss and also an essential tool for developing her taste and confidence.
“Photography is how I keep my inner child alive. Photography has taught me to fall in love with life,” she shares with Nicole Acheampong in an interview in the book, adding:
I love finding unexpected rainbows, and sunshine and a beautiful green park and kids’ chalk drawings on the sidewalk and melted ice cream and butterflies and flowers and Black girls with bright-blue braids and sweet graffiti poetry! I keep my inner child alive by taking pictures of my every day. I’m always finding things that I’m so in love with. …Photography is, and will always be, a daily practice of falling in love with as many things as I can.
Whether captured in a Los Angeles parking lot or against a purple wall in New Jersey, Bobb-Willis’s images are dynamic and vivid, drawing beauty and exuberance from unassuming spaces.
Keep the Kid Alive is available on Bookshop, and you can find more from Bobb-Willis on her website and Instagram.
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