Zayira Ray
2022 HEAR US Awardee
Department of Photography & Imaging Class of 2022
Zayira Ray is an Indian-American portrait photographer from New York City. Her work focuses on telling soulful visual stories of women and girls from all backgrounds and walks of life, with an emphasis on subjects of South Asian descent.
Project
Brown Love
I grew up watching Bollywood movies and internalizing a representation of Brown love that felt far out of my reach as a young Indian-American girl. I later learned that those films only reinforced outdated conventions, serving as a one-dimensional lens into our community. On the other hand, the Western perspective that I was fed of South Asia through the media was often tainted with domestic violence and warped power structures at the forefront. Neither perspective left room for nuance; the vast diversity of relationships that exist in-between remain to be stories largely untold.
“Brown Love" is a photography series that aims to tell those stories: it is a celebration and embrace of companionship, belonging, and intimacy across a wide scope of romantic, platonic, and familial relationships from the South Asian diaspora. With intention and care, these photographs depict brown love in its purest form: with tenderness, belonging, and everything in-between. The body of work centers brown women and other marginalized identities depicted in a position of agency rather than submission, finally in control of telling their own authentic stories. The subjects are photographed in front of vibrant, hand-painted backdrops that serve as a safe space for love and liberation— an escape from a world that is ridden with convention and suppression.
This is our love story.