Vanessa Leroy

Vanessa Leroy (b. 1996) is a photographer from Waltham, Massachusetts. She is currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She remains on the hunt for new ways of seeing, remembering, and altering the world through photography. She is drawn to image-making because of the power it holds to create nuanced representation for marginalized people and uplift their stories. She sees photography as a tool for social justice, and with it, she hopes to create worlds that people feel as though they can enter and draw from, as well as provide a look into an experience that they may not personally recognize. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post and exhibited at Gallery Kayafas in Boston, MA.

there's a place i want to take you

Within this book of cloth cyanotypes, I’ve created a map of my experience of black girlhood, and these pages serve as a bridge to my present experience. You’ll find journal entries from the 5th grade, family scrapbook photographs, passing thoughts, music lyrics, and images I’ve taken between 2014 and 2019. I wanted to re-contextualize these artifacts by exposing them to light, creating diptychs, inserting text and illustrations, and binding the timeline with thread. There isn’t a lot of space for dreaming in an oppressive world, so I use photography as a tool to create a space where I can freely navigate the various facets of my life experience and identity.

To view more of Vanessa Leroy’s work please visit their website.