“Everyone here figures out how to get it,” says photographer Nicole Hernandez, currently crouched like a wildcat on top of her dining room table, staring down down a Mamiya RB67. “Here” is Atlanta, and “it” is making a name for oneself, though it could also be securing a pay check or scoring a gram of weed. “I want this place to feel like an artist’s residency,” she continues. “I want to fill the space with artists.” From the assortment of local creatives congregating around her home studio for this impromptu photoshoot, it looks like she’s already halfway there.
Before Nicole came to Atlanta, her geographical outlook of where to next? was a simple triptych: LA, New York, and the rural stretch of Clayton, North Carolina she called home. As any author of the Southern Gothic can tell you, there’s something about the mugginess and the mundanity of such in-between towns that breeds more than just gnats. Nicole evokes these vignettes like the snap of a flyswatter: the church camp where she found herself mosquito-eaten from head to toe, the youth leader corralling her cabinmates around to pray away the angry bites. There were field parties, X’s on hands from sneaking into bars, and parking lot hangouts at the local Bojangles. “Bojangles was the smoke spot,” Nicole recalls. “I’d get to Bojangles at 6:45am, smoke weed, and be at school by 7:15am.”
After high school, Nicole began to feel a creative spark in the styling world, but a year-long stint in New York left her feeling defeated, and an unfinished degree in costuming and video production loomed in the rearview. A girl’s trip to Atlanta in 2015 cut through the haze, when a visit to a neighbourhood bar became a late-night kickback of up-and-coming artists. “We were just hanging out and becoming friends,” Nicole explains, invoking images of tallboys and makeshift studio spaces. “It speaks so much to Atlanta, how everyone figures out how to make their own opportunities using the resources that they have available. Because even though you have these producers and rappers who are blowing up at the time, they’re still making music in a closet.”
Newly inspired, Nicole vowed to make it to Atlanta within the year. An assistant manager opening at the Atlanta Buffalo Exchange was her ticket to ride, and she quickly began transfer arrangements from her Charlotte-based outpost. Retail was something to pay the bills, but the consignment shop’s eclectic and stylish atmosphere attracted a network of soon-to-be friends and creative collaborators with whom she sought opportunities to style local photoshoots.
As her circle grew, so too did her interest in capturing the moments she was styling. Borrowing cameras allowed Nicole to exercise her photographic eye and explore her penchant for ephemeral beauty, her sense of style developing largely through behind-the-scenes shots she’d snap in between wardrobe assistance. Curiosity soon burgeoned into confidence, and with that, a revelation that she could shoot and lead typically male-fronted projects. “As a woman, I would see things that the men who were photographing these projects may not have noticed,” says Nicole. “That’s not to say that all men aren’t aware of those tiny details, but I think as a woman photographing women, now I see why I saw things a little bit differently than they did.”
When Nicole made the leap to buy a camera of her own — a T-series Canon from a shop back in North Carolina — she leaned full-throttle into documenting the intricacies she felt were missing. Inspired by the tenderness of Nan Goldin’s work, she began capturing subjects in sensual streams of consciousness. Now several years into her career, she’s photographed the likes of Baby Rose, Latto, FKA Twigs, and numerous indie and hip-hop acts local to her Atlanta home. From photographing members of the trans community in the South, to the ritual of young women getting ready to go out, to casual smoke sessions with friends, it’s in photographing intimate, fleeting moments that her talent shines most tangibly.
“I enjoy work that feels really honest,” Nicole explains. “When I shot my project Last Days of Summer, it was very organic. I’m not really posing anything, I just want to exist as a fly on the wall. I’m asking, what are these friends actually doing? They’re getting ready. They’re rolling up. They’re hanging out. They’re giggling, putting on makeup. And now we’re going to go out by the water. It was really natural.”
This centring of reciprocated trust and authenticity is especially vital to her more erotically-motivated work. “Provocative is the word that keeps coming up, but that’s not how I view it.” Nicole chews this word —provocative — pausing for a minute. By now, the projected movie that’s been silently lighting our interview with rich hues (Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love) has long since rolled past the credits. A joint, soon to be stickied with lipgloss, sits on the coffee table in front of us. The empty projector screen is replaced by an image Nicole shot of FKA Twigs performing at Blue Flame Lounge, Atlanta’s first Black adult entertainment club, back in 2019. “God, the strength in her arms!” she says. “The movement in her hair! The light reflecting off of the pleasers! Some of my work has been deemed provocative, but that’s not how I view it. I think my work is very sensual.”
As a survivor of sexual violence, sensual becomes a synonym for both softness and power in Nicole’s visual world. “Reclamation is one of the reasons that I love erotic photography,” she says. “I’ve been sexualised my entire life. My body is mine now. It’s important for me to be the one that’s like, I’m doing this, I’m showing this, I’m expressing this because it feels good.” From strip club culture to foot fetishes and boudoir, creating room for documenting vulnerability is at the core of her work, as is highlighting the very real sex workers who have popularised many of the aesthetics simultaneously consumed and condemned in the mainstream. “There’s a certain level of protectiveness,” she notes of this process. “Storytelling is important. Feeling their strength is really important.”
Having arrived at this foothold through a mix of hustle, curiosity, and the same Canon she’s kept close now for years, Nicole retains a steady vision while remaining open to surprises. “Asserting myself was not something that came easy,” she says. Now, with Atlanta behind her and the world in front of her, faith in her own appetite takes a more lucid vehicle: “I ask for what I need.”
Credits
Images courtesy of the artist.