Combing through the portfolioย of 19-year-old photographer Myles Loftin, it is abundantly clear why heโs become an in-demand hired gun for progressive magazines. His work combines youthful exuberanceโeven his staged portraiture is brimming with organic warmth and intimacyโwith a powerful commitment to eroding problematic stereotypes and uplift his fellow artists.
Loftin, who is currently finishing up his freshman year at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, became enamored with photography between eighth and ninth grade when his family brought his uncleโs camera with them on vacation in Italy. From there, the Maryland native began developing his soulful eye and artistic principles.
โWhen I first started, I was taking a lot of pictures of myself just because I wasnโt really confident enough to take pictures of other people,โ Loftin explains over the phone. โAnd then, at some point, I started branching out and photographing my friends. I just really enjoy interacting with people and creating great images with them whether they be candid or posed.โ
Now, Loftin balances commissioned shoots for outlets like Oyster, The Fader,ย and Urban Outfitters, among others, with personal projects that use both stills and film to make incisive statements about racial inequity in America.
As with many young artists balancing academic and professional careers, it can be tough to keep the two from bleeding into each other. Loftin was asked to shoot a feature forย The Fader on ex-Baltimore Raven Eugene Monroe, who is battling the rampant prescription painkiller abuse in the NFL byย advocating for medicinal marijuana instead.. Loftin was offered the opportunity after contributing to aย Faderย piece onย contemporary teen culture. The only problem was that Loftin was in the midst of his college orientation in New York, nearly 200 miles from Baltimore where the retired offensive tackle resides.
โI think the editor thought that I was still in Maryland, not that Iโd moved to New York for school, so I ended up taking a bus down one day during orientation,โ Loftin says. โI shot him, and then got on a bus back to school, so it was a pretty cool day.โ
But while heโs honed his skills as a commissioned photographer, and hopes to also begin branching into editorial fashion work as well, Loftin is best known for HOODED, a multimedia project that peels back the layers of coded language and imagery to expose the fraught media portrayal of black teenagers in hoodies.
The project debuted this March onย Milk, where Loftin is interning this summer. The images are joyous and playful; the models wear pastel hoodies in front of saturated backdrops, showing intimacy and vulnerability that defy trite notions of masculinity. But Loftin also juxtaposes captures of the Google results for โblack boy in hoodie,โ which include two versions of theย enduring black-and-white shot of Trayvon Martinย staring into the camera, and โwhite boy in hoodie.โ
โI saw a tweet that was a comparison of the two Google searches that I ultimately included in the piece: four white teenagers and four black teenagers,โ he explains of HOODEDโs genesis. โIt annoyed me that that was what you get when you Google it, and so when I saw that I internalized it, and it was in the back of my mind.โ
Itโs a staggering work, and the video is perhaps its most haunting component. As the models (and Loftin himself) rotate, they are peppered with a series of audio clips, beginning with Hillary Clintonโs โsuper-predatorโ comments from 1996, followed by George Zimmermanโs call to the police in 2012, mere minutes before fatally shooting Martin, and ending with a barrage of TV news anchors using the phrase โblack maleโ to describe suspects. Loftin begins by pulling on the thread of how we vilify African-Americans in hoodies, and when itโs all finally unraveled, weโre left with the frayed heap that is the state of race in the media today. The piece also includes a powerful untitled poem by Leo Avedon.
HOODED is his most striking project, but in his other pieces heโs shown a knack for capturing the resonance of quotidian moments, as he did in a photo essay forย Rookieย where he turned a family reunion in South Carolina into subtitled film stills, as well as a keen understanding of staging and framing, evident in the elegant โPanther Girl Visits the MET.โ In the latter, Loftinโs subject dons a black beret and carves out a space for herself in the lily-white halls of one of the worldโs most famous museums.
โItโs a critique of the museum being predominantly white and male for so long,โ Loftin says. โThen the moving images were supposed to be her kind of taking it back for herself and creating her own art within the museum as a form of rebellion.โ
While Loftin is eager to begin studying the formal conventions and history of his medium as a sophomore, the photographer draws much of his inspiration from social media, particularly Instagram. He made his account just before getting his first camera in 2012 and currently has more than 18,000 followers. He uses it to promote his own projects as well those of his friends.
โEver since I got my camera Iโve been posting pictures and finding photographers I liked, and through finding those photographers I found what I like to shoot,โ he says. โInteracting with different people who were in my area or all the way across the world or across the country and just exchanging ideas and supporting other artists and building community, itโs been really, really cool.โ
Loftinโs love of Instagram and his desire to promote the works of other talented artists of color (he recently started a Twitter thread celebrating many that he knows and follows) culminated in him being featured as part of Instagramโs new Praise Hands campaign. He used the opportunity to shout-out Teen Vogue,ย writer-model Anzie Dasabe, and Moonlightย director Barry Jenkins.
โIโve been using Instagram for five years, and now that Iโm on Instagramโs Instagram, itโs completely full circle. Itโs something I never wouldโve imagined would happen as a 14-year-old posting self-portraits or pictures of my breakfast on Instagram,โ Loftin said. โI understand itโs important to be selfish about your own work because itโs yours and you need to be concerned about your growth and your career, but itโs also important to uplift the people who are in your community and the people who support you, especially for minority artists because itโs so hard sometimes for us to be seen and heard.โ
With his prodigious talent, work ethic, and penchant for moving, inimitable portraiture, Myles Loftin is doing all the right things to be seen and heard, and heโs made it abundantly clear that he has something crucial to do from his platform.