John Edmonds

John Edmonds is a photographer and artist based in Brooklyn. He creates photographs that stage encounters between live Black subjects and historic African sculptures, using gesture and positioning to explore relationships between person and object.

John Edmonds makes photographs in conversation with sculpture. Across fourteen images made since 2024 in the Museum of Art and Origins in Washington Heights, he orchestrates encounters between live subjects and historic African sculptures, where gesture becomes the point of contact—a tilt of the head, a hand at rest, a shared expression—between person and object. Working in photography and video, he challenges art historical precedents by centering Black queer subjects and drawing on religious paintings and modernist photography, incorporating elements of Black fashion like hoodies and du-rags that celebrate individual style while tapping into shared visual language. The exhibition developed through his sustained relationship with artist and scholar George Nelson Preston, who founded the Museum of Art and Origins in 2006. At the heart of his work, Edmonds says, is his desire to leave people with something more human and to open up feeling and empathy.