VELL
This capsule is the first in a series called Now Then, in which I revisit and re-stage photographs from the archive my grandmother—who folks called Vell—kept. The series marks the establishment of The Vell Collection, an ongoing effort to fully digitize her archive.
Bezel is the digital companion to my five published works: I Don't Like the Blues (2020), We Travel (2020), We Dance (2021), Ghosts of Segregation (2024), and We Travel (2026). Explore Capsules to learn more about the project, and Credits for a list of collaborators, media coverage, talks, and more.
Bezel is my digital portfolio. It gathers framing materials—work samples, photos, footage, and notes—around my five published works: I Don't Like the Blues (2020), We Travel (2020), We Dance (2021), Ghosts of Segregation (2024), and We Make (2025).
Keeping Time
I grew up watching my grandmother keep time. Behind the living room door, two sets of encyclopedias, church devotionals, and hymnals. In her bedroom drawer, obituaries. In notebooks beside the kitchen phone, the addresses of all our people who had left but sometimes made their way back for the reunion. In the front room with the green carpet, boxes and albums of photographs. She kept time in days too—time to talk to people on the phone, and to sit with folks in they living rooms, and to do for folks.
The mantle clock and behind-the-door bookshelf. The Vell Collection · 2007
Bezel
And in my work, I model her. I keep time her way — with photographs and the material culture of my family — and after fifteen years of learning and doing, I have developed my own way too: working in community, across ethnography, oral history, photography, and film, toward a record of Black life in the rural South that is not only true but alive to the people and places it represents.
Bezel is where those practices meet—my grandmother’s keeping practice and my own. As a digital space, it does something I’ve been working toward for several years: it gathers the materials around my projects—background writing, photos, footage, talks, and other media—so that the stories, time, and things that people share are not only written about, but also seen, heard, and kept.
The Black Volumes
The Black Volumes—an ongoing oral history digital archive—is also a reflection of Grandma. I was inspired by the two sets of encyclopedias she and Grandpa kept behind their living room door. Those books gathered knowledge about the world. The volumes here do too: the lives, memories, and histories of Black communities in the rural South.
And It's the most important thing to me.
Remarks · Shannon Elementary School · 2025
Discussing the impact of Grandma on the work that I do. The remarks began the community screening of the film We Make, which tells the story of Siggers High School. Video: Roosevelt Ford
Credits