Last June, queer artist and educator Naima Green’s life was turned upside down when she got into a bad car accident while on assignment in Virginia. After returning to New York, she spent months on bed rest before embarking on a long period of physical therapy to regain full use of her arms. “I was in so much pain and I was really depressed,” she says. “I couldn’t move or hold anything. I wasn’t thinking about making pictures. All I could do was sleep.”
Focusing on recovery, Naima began an extraordinary journey into a new space, one that has allowed her to break free of the known and discover her world anew through the lens of pleasure, play, sensuality, and intimacy. On the first anniversary of her accident, Naima opened A Sequence for Squeezing at Baxter Street, a new exhibition that reclaims the private, primal joys of everyday life that we all feel but seldom fully recognize — until circumstances force us to reevaluate our priorities.
Like many who move through life at a breakneck pace, Naima came to understand that sacrificing her health for work had become untenable. “I began thinking about what I have the capacity for and how my pace has to change,” she says. “It was a time of reckoning to realize, ‘you can’t do this anymore.’ Freedom comes in this slowness, being intentional, and making time for pleasure that feels nourishing for everyone involved. If I am spending time with people, it’s because I really care and want to go deep with them.”
Community and communion are integral features of Naima’s work. In 2019, she released Pur·suit, a deck of playing cards featuring queer people of color inspired by photographer Catherine Opie’s landmark Dyke Deck from the early 90s. Naima’s lyrical portraits are about seeing and being seen, creating a space for mutual understanding and discovery — a practice she brings to her newest bodies of work.
“The people I collaborate with are usually friends, and those relationships start through photography,” she says. “What I love about this show is that I feel new to my own practice. I can see myself letting go of conceptions I had around what an artist’s practice looks like and just having fun, delighting in looking and spending time with people. I’m allowing the pictures to happen rather than staging everything and working from a strict idea.”
In releasing herself from preconceived ideas, Naima has taken a leap of faith into the unknown. Here she discovered something she did not expect: the vulnerability and strength of her visualizing her own desires. “I’m now showing people what I want to look at, who I am spending time with, and what is delightful to myself and the person I am photographing,” she says. “I’m allowing more of my desire [to be seen] and allowing things to unfold rather than having a clear plan of what I want the outcome to be before I started.”
Naima experienced a moment of revelation when a friend came for a visit. “On the last day, I asked, ‘What is something pleasurable for you to eat?’ and she said, ‘A soft-boiled egg,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Let me photograph you in your own delight.’” In that moment, A Sequence for Squeezing was born — a journey to discover the tender intimacies of our senses enraptured in the moments of having and holding, consuming and releasing, and ultimately becoming one with the earth.
Working with Polaroids, Naima began making sequences of her friends eating sensual fruits as well as her fiancée Sable peeing in the desert of Joshua Tree in San Bernardino, California. “I had seen a picture by Catherine Opie where someone was full frontal peeing on the side of the road and I love that picture, but I also like going hikes and peeing in the forest,” she says. “It’s also about freedom. I see men peeing in public all the time but it’s not that easy for women to do. Finding a place where you can be outside with nature and not upset the moment by rushing to find a restroom — because it’s just the two of us. Why would this be taboo?”
And yet the double standard remains pervasive in practice, with images of women urinating becoming largely fetishized. In reclaiming this moment — for herself and all women — Naima celebrates release, whether it’s in the physical act of breaking gendered boundaries or from the limitations of the still image itself. With A Sequence for Squeezing, Naima embraces sequencing and double exposures, as well as introduces her first video work, “The intimacy of before,” as a way to elongate the moment and welcome a multi-directional way of looking.
In July 2020, Naima moved out of her Brooklyn apartment where she had spent six years building her life. She was leaving her home and a relationship at a time when the pandemic had left many feeling isolated and alone. Reflecting on the words of British playwright Hanif Kureishi, who posed the question, “What do you take when you’re never coming back?” in his 1998 book Intimacy, Naima began to think of how to translate these emotions into a video that would allow her to engage with the sensual physicality of touch.
The video, like the photographic series, were born out of the knowledge it was time to let go and move on, and in doing so be open to receiving the bounty and blessings of the universe. “I’m allowing the private things I love to become public,” Naima says, and in doing so invites us to consider how we might do the same.
Naima Green: A Sequence for Squeezing is on view at Baxter St Camera Club of New York through July 23, 2022.
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Credits
Photography Naima Green