In Care Of
In Care Of is an ongoing Polaroid portrait series by Jalani Morgan, created in collaboration with writer and editor Stacy Lee Kong.
The physical medium of Polaroid is central to this work: immediate yet fragile, material yet archival, each portrait functions as both moment and memory. The goal is to photograph Black folks in a physical medium, partially to disrupt dominant culture perceptions of nostalgia, but mainly to create a physical archive that documents Black people in Toronto (and beyond).
Jalani sees this work in conversation with Fade Resistance, a 2017 project by Toronto artist and educator Zun Lee, who collected lost Polaroids of Black Americans as they marked the big and small moments in their lives. Zun’s archival work resonated with Jalani’s own professional focus on ‘unforgetting’—a deliberate act of remembrance that “requires the unearthing of neglected histories… and an insistence not to be forgotten,” as Jalani and academic Nicole Bernhardt defined it in a panel at the 2016 graduate student conference hosted by the Harriet Tubman Institute at York University.
This project begins with Black models, people who already know how to hold a gaze. But here, they’re invited to show up differently: not in performance, but in presence. Each session is built around a single pack of Polaroid film—eight frames—and a conversation with each model that touches on presence, agency and ease. The process is purposefully slow, intentional and collaborative. Jalani and Stacy started by coming up with a list of questions that created room for each model to reminisce about their own experiences, take the conversation in new directions, or even disagree. Those values of intentionality and collaboration extended to the shoot itself; the direction of the conversation inspired Jalani’s compositions.
For Stacy, this work naturally continues her interest in highlighting underrepresented stories with nuance and compassion. She has explored this throughout her career, most recently through Friday Talks, a video series she created through her independent media brand, Friday Things. The latest season focused on conversations about immigrants and immigration, especially the things we say in group chats—but rarely publicly.
At its core, In Care Of is about slowing down, making space, and asking what it feels like when someone chooses how they want to be seen.
