Photography is in Deana Lawson’s blood. She grew up in Rochester, a working-class city in New York state, where her grandmother cleaned the house of the founder of Kodak. Her mother was an administrator at the company, and a keen organiser of family photo albums; her dad was a photographer.

“We had tons of family pictures, at social events, cookouts, barbecues,” Lawson tells me. “My father was also a videographer. Looking at those albums and videos over the years implanted a certain aesthetic.” The 39-year-old is drawn to domestic details in her own work: rugs, carpets, net curtains, faux flowers. “I’m very much inspired by my family home, dress, attire.”

Roxie And Raquel who, like Lawson, are identical twins. Photograph from Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2018)

Lawson’s highly staged yet intimate portraits, often taken in domestic environments, centre on themes of black identity, intimacy and spirituality. She captures black bodies, striking in both their strength and vulnerability, engaged in rituals and daily routines. She calls her subjects her “family”, though most are strangers cast from the street. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016, she reached new audiences when her portrait Binky And Tony Forever was featured on the cover of the Blood Orange album Freetown Sound. Earlier this month, she photographed Rihanna for the cover of Garage magazine, bringing her signature style to celebrity portraiture; in an inside shot, the singer reclines in an unlikely room, with a threadbare carpet and homely mess in one corner.

Rihanna, photographed by Deana Lawson for Garage magazine, 2018

Lawson has worked in Louisiana, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (she was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, which enabled her to travel), but her photographs have a quality that means they might have been taken anywhere, something she emphasises with ambiguous titles such as Living Room and Nikki’s Kitchen. You also can’t quite tell when a picture has been taken: in the past, present or some kind of alternate timeline – perhaps an afrofuturist one, in the sense that her work suggests a place of belonging and liberation for black people.

Everyone recognises themselves in her work, she says. “I travel with a book of printsand it’s an instant familiarity: ‘That person looks like my aunt!’” For inspiration, Lawson often goes to flea markets to pick up strangers’ family albums. “I always have a very emotional response to album pictures, even other people’s. I just like the idea of looking at different chapters in people’s lives.”

Binky And Tony Forever was featured on the cover of a Blood Orange album. Photograph from Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2018)

Lawson’s work often features nude or partially dressed subjects – shimmering skin exposed next to silk, breasts, stretchmarks, tattoos, all of it exposed to the camera’s gaze. Her photographs seem to say that sometimes the body is enough, without added markers of social or cultural capital. She likes to play with themes of masculine bravado and femininity, too. In Oath, a man sits with his legs splayed, against a lush wall of greenery. He is topless, staring down the lens. But on his lap, a woman in a bikini holds the eye. She is “somewhat gentle, holding on to him as if she’s caring for him”, Lawson explains. “Like she is his centre.” She uses a phrase I’ve never heard before: black innocence. “When we think about blackness, I feel like innocence isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind, but I wanted to use that notion.” The picture manages to be intimate but not sexual, a tender depiction of young love.

Lawson’s photographs can make you feel you’ve just walked in on something. While her subjects frequently look into the camera, their bodies are more often side on, as if recently engaged in something else. In a shot taken in Charleston, South Carolina, a man and a barefoot woman stand on kitchen tiles for a shot called Seagulls In Kitchen. “I met two strangers and I loved the colour of her kitchen and the details.” Again, it is a simple depiction of black love, because “romance in African American history has always been framed as problematic.”

With Mickey And Friends, shot in Jamaica, Lawson wanted to reference Egyptian art. Photograph from Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2018)

An identical twin, Lawson is drawn to photographing people in pairs. To create Roxie And Raquel, she grabbed two identical twin girls in a restaurant in New Orleans and went home with them to shoot at midnight, asking them to throw on tops they liked that matched the colour of the wall behind them. In Mickey And Friends, shot in Kingston, Jamaica, two women, one darker-skinned, one lighter, face each other in a pose that references Egyptian art. “It’s how figures were painted back then,” Lawson says, “between two-dimensional and three-dimensionality.” The Mickey Mouse mural had grabbed her instantly: “I saw that wall while riding through the city. I knew I was going back to use it as a backdrop.”

For Cortez, Lawson asked a stranger in Alabama to hop on to a Cadillac. Photograph from Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2018)

She sees her work as a holistic process, from finding the subjects to creating the setting. “Who is going to be the vessel in this image? Or who is it that I happen to just run into on the train, or in a grocery store, where I’m just captivated? The subject brings their own gravitas. And then I bring my looking, my kind of gaze, my lights, to marry the two.”

While Lawson is better known for staging images, other shots come about in seconds. Once, in Alabama, she asked a man with a group of friends if he would hop up on a Cadillac, and if he minded removing his shirt. “Everyone kind of laughed, like, ‘What is this?’ but he was totally down for it.” Still holding his spliff, the man naturally adopted a reclining, “feminine” pose. “Often in the history of photography, men with cameras have been drawn to beautiful women. This is the opposite of that – a woman being drawn to an attractive man, and saying, ‘OK, I want to photograph you.’”

In Greased Scalp, a mother softens her daughter’s skin. Photograph from Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2018)

In Greased Scalp, a mother softens her daughter’s skin. “When I was growing up, I would often scratch my mother’s scalp and grease it. I remember once she was bragging to my aunt: ‘Deana scratches scalp so good.’” Grooming between women is important in the black community: ritualistic and close, often involving pain and heat, but also soothing, wetting, drying, stroking, massaging. “This sort of female care is not necessarily sensual, but intimate in a familial way. It’s very cathartic to have one’s hair done.” Then Lawson added her staged element: “I wanted to take that and slightly sensualise it, with the purple and the nude body.”

Her work constantly treads this line between the staged and the real; are they mutually exclusive? Lawson thinks not, or that they can be reconciled. “I’m drawn to the staged and to the documentary. I also have a sincere love of painting. So I think all of those things kind of come together. There is the thrill of looking at documentary pictures: ‘I wish I was there to see that.’ But then there is also the imaginative side, the side that’s like a dream.”

• Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, with an introduction by Zadie Smith, is published on 25 September; go to aperture.org/shop for details. Micha Frazer-Carroll is the arts and culture editor of gal-dem magazine.

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