Zayira Ray

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 I later learned that those films only reinforced outdated conventions, serving as a one-dimensional lens into our community.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.