The direction was built around deliberate visual choices — pearls, red lips, a black swimsuit, a pool. Each element was selected because it carries cultural weight. Luxury signifiers that have historically framed a specific kind of woman. This work asks what happens when that frame is recentered.

Location was intentional. The Lafayette Hotel carries the visual language of mid-century leisure — the kind of imagery that saturated magazines and advertisements of that era. Shooting there wasn't nostalgia. It was reclamation.

Black women were never actually missing from these spaces — the camera just wasn't pointed at them. Nobody was putting them in magazines, campaigns, editorials in those spaces. The absence was in the images, not in real life. These photos don't beg for inclusion. They simply document what was always true.