Y’all Don’t Wanna Hear Me You Just Wanna Dance with Brandon Foushée
Produced by Worlds Through Minds founder, Macy Castañeda Lee.
- Name, age, where are you from, what format you like using, what are you currently working on if you are?
● Brandon Foushée
● New Jersey
● 35mm and 4x5 but any camera that's closest to me at the time is the best one
● For me, right now I’m just working on scanning more of my images and reading/researching hoping to continue my current body of work.
Photograph by Brandon Foushée
- What about your surroundings/environments and upbringing interested you?
● I think growing up I was an observer since I was a more quiet kid. I would kind of learn by looking first before doing. Thankfully I’ve also had my older siblings to guide the way and I think because I was the youngest, I had a lot more time to myself so in highschool is where I really started to become curious of the world, of America and photography.
- When was the first time you met photography? How did you feel when you met it?
● The first time I became acquainted with photography was in highschool. I grew up drawing and making sculptures but whenever I saw photographs getting praised I was a bit disappointed because I had the naive perspective of “how hard was it? All you do is click a button”. Because of that curiosity, I took a digital photography class in highschool and was hooked ever since I knew how to control the camera and get it to make a picture the way I wanted it. Classically, making my first long exposure felt like magic.
Photograph by Brandon Foushée
- Tell us about your solo show "Y'all Dont Wanna Hear Me You Just Wanna Dance", what inspired you to make it? How long did it take? Any highlights from the exhibition period?
● Y’all Don’t Wanna Hear Me You Just Wanna Dance overall is about celebrating the fragmented family histories people have and in this case I use my family as the catalyst to ask myself about my position within this family legacy. I used a culmination of family archival photographs, my own photographs, mirrors and other mixed media to investigate my existential queries about America, familial connection, and memory.
● This work came from wanting to extend an older body of work I previously showed at Pratt Institute titled Double Moon which was attempting at understanding how my family show up in my life without their physical bodies being present. But for Y’all Don’t Hear Me, You Just Wanna Dance, that body over work took a little over a year.
● For me, my main takeaways were getting the experience to put together a full exhibition with professional framing and working though my first ever residency. To work with the folks at Baxter Street Camera Club was an amazing time and their knowledge and skills helped tremendously with getting this show up and running in time. I was truly grateful for that experience.
Photograph by Brandon Foushée
- How did you find your visual literacy? Why are you attracted to certain images than others?
● Finding your visual literacy is tough. As an artist, of course the goal is to find your voice but in a way, I hope I don’t ever get to a point of fully understanding my visual literacy and voice so that I always have something to work towards. I’d like to get close but never actually touch it.
● For me, images will always have specific context in certain scenarios. Right now, I recognize I’m attracted to images of my family and images of the past as I register it with both nostalgia and memory, but I also recognize that will change after some time.
Photograph by Brandon Foushée
- Feel free to share any photographers that have had a huge impact on your career.
● Deana Lawson
● Noah Davis (Painter)
● Louis Draper
● Ming Smith
Photograph by Brandon Foushée
- Imagine meeting someone who is picking up a camera for the first time. what do you tell them?
● Embrace “happy” accidents. Every failed photograph gets you closer to your intention and voice.
Photograph by Brandon Foushée