In the summer of 2005, Harambee United Church of Christ in Harrisburg was staging a play titled What It Means to Speak Life as part of their Maafa observance.
The story follows a young man who gets pulled in with the wrong crowd and has to find his way back out. I took the cast down to the graffiti walls to shoot the promo images, and we spent an afternoon working on solo portraits and group shots that leaned all the way into the play’s mood.
These are the frames from that day. A few of them became the poster.
The cast: Nathaniel Gadsden, Johntrae Williams, William “BuBaaH” Smith, and Jon Scott. Directed by Johntrae Williams.
