I spoke about AJ back on the old version of this site, but for those of you who are new, here’s the story.
I came across AJ on Instagram back in April of 2022 (I’m guestimating as the only thing I can track is our first message which was early May 2022). For very close to a year, we’d gone back and forth with one another about wanting to working together and passing ideas back and forth. In April 2023, I finally went ahead and decided to make my first trip to the East Coast since 2016 just to photograph AJ. So I bought a plane ticket to New York for that June!
That 12 months of back and forth made our first real life meeting a lot easier. We were already friends when I walked downstairs from the studio to greet her. We conversed about life and joked about all things during our shoot, which is always a plus for me. We created some dope work, but my favorite part of the day was when she pulled out her ID while signing a model release, me realizing that we had the same birthday (I’m *cough* years older than her), and her squealing at the fact that we were birthday twins. I like to think that made our friendship bond a little tighter.
From that shoot we had, I featured a few of the photographs in Create Vol. 3, but I also recently compiled them into a The Raw Volume 10. What AJ and I shot is a little different from what I typically feature in The Raw, but I wanted to get her in a Bishop Jackson book, and unfortunately we didn’t have enough photographs to compile something different; there’s only so much that you can do in a studio with a black backdrop (well, you could do more, but enough for a book of one person photographed over 3 hours?). Below are two photographs from The Raw Volume 10. Pick up a copy, and support the little homie by checking her out on Instagram: @amjrva.
