This Body is No Less Than a Work of Art J "Slim" Robertson for ISSUE 14

I am J "Slim" Robertson creative director, photographer, and the brains behind The Slim Creative. I started shooting as just another stream of income on top of my graphic design business in March of 2018. In the beginning, I was shooting literately anything I could and just for the side income. No styling, no directing, no purpose, just pointing and shooting. After a while, I started to feel like things were becoming routine and I was tired of just shooting. With my design background from my undergraduate degree at NC State University, I got back to my artistic roots and began to create stories and pieces of art that people could enjoy and love. I started to collaborate with other artists and creatives and do what I truly enjoyed. I became a creative director and not just another photographer. I style, direct, teach, pick makeup, hair, and so much more. Lately, I feel that I have found my purpose in this creative lane and that is to show my black Queens & Kings in a truly beautiful authentic light, and share my knowledge and opportunities with other creatives. No filter, no body modifications, just blackness in all its melanin glory. I genuinely believe we don’t have enough representation in the media in a natural way and I’m doing my part to change that one frame at a time. I took the theme The Body IS Art and looked at it in two ways. First is that the physical body and how it looks is art. How our skin looks in different lights and how our imperfections make us uniquely beautiful. Secondly, the way our bodies move can also be art. How they bend, stretch, and flow is beautiful and can be captured in such a way that expresses that. These two things are why I used 5 different muses of varying shapes, tones, and just overall bodies to show as much range as I could for this body of work.

Model Talea Harden

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