The first time I saw Gioncarlo Valentine, what I felt was jealousy. It was in a photograph, a nearly nude self-portrait, showing Valentine spread out on a bed. The look on his face awed and terrified me—I’d never seen someone with a big, beautiful black body like mine look so content to be naked in a photograph. What shocked me was not simply how Valentine must have conquered a fear by appearing naked and comfortable in that bed; it was how the image seemed to capture the expansive contours of our fears—the shared fears of black men—in a photo that was uniquely and absolutely him.

“Self Portrait,” 2016.

The next day, I looked him up online and found every photograph of his that I could. I learned that he was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1990, and grew up as a queer kid in a family and community that didn’t know how to accept him. The photographs I discovered—like the ones in his series “The Soft Fence,” which feature other young black men from Baltimore—catalogue the damn-near infinite ways that we ritualize fear in our bodies.