Cleveland Black Photographer — Aja Joi Photography

we all have our individual stories, with plot lines, conflict & resolution, and preservation. When we lay down the blueprints of our complexities and look at all the moving parts, you can send love and healing to all those small, intricate places.

We can relate to each other through the different emotions we’ve felt, different levels of pain and happiness. These are the types of conversations I want to have with my art. Currently, my main community and healing source is made of black femmes, people who look like me. This is the group I ride the hardest for, because I know their pain and they know mine.

My first photo magazine was dedicated to the divine femme, a force that saved me. A force that I am still learning to fully and unapologetically embrace.

For me, I know I am focused on combating the internalized messages I was given in my youth that made me look at my blackness as anything other than beautiful and worthy. I want my work to celebrate and reflect pride, sophistication, and dignity like Mrs Florestine Perrault Collins said.

I want to take photos of beauty without standards or limitations. And by that I mean raw human beauty, as in acceptance and warm embrace of the person in the mirror.

Art has so much healing potential, and I’ll be in my lane making people fall in love with themselves.