“I like to describe myself as a creative rather than a photographer,” says Christopher “ThoughtPoet” Brown. “Sometimes I feel like the label is limiting. I write, I act, and I try to do more with my photos than just capture moments.”
Though his time at Little Black Pearl put him in the shoes of an artist, in high school Brown was more likely to be found interviewing artists than making art. In his junior year, he started doing journalism with True Star Magazine, a youth-run nonprofit media company. “We had a website called Lyrical Lab, and I would interview and photograph artists that were starting to pop, some that are still popping,” he says. He was able to meet artists like Noname, Saba, and Chance the Rapper through his participation in Young Chicago Authors and the Chicago Public Library’s YOUmedia. “Once the website went on hiatus is when I started to take my art more seriously.”
Before the shoots, Brown says, “we went and had conversations with the people in these photos. You might see really wild colors, or interesting patterns and a lot of that is really explaining in detail who these people are. Because both of us are spiritually grounded, that gave us a very solid foundation for what the work was going to look like.”
It was also appropriate that Brown would photograph that particular story: a feature by a black Chicago woman on a childhood acquaintance of his, tackling the subject of spaces where black kids seek escape.
