Myles Loftin is a twenty-year-old freelance photographer and a Junior studying photography at Parsons School of Design. His work spans portraiture and fashion photography, often incorporating vibrant color schemes and various film stocks. Common themes covered within his work include the black experience, identity, and representation of marginalized individuals. Myles recognizes the power that images hold in our society, and seeks to use that power for positive change. He has shown in publications such as i-D, The Fader, V Magazine, Aperture as well as in several art spaces across the U.S. Art is an important part of his life and, as an artist of color, he works to inspire other artists of color to pursue successful careers in the creative industry.
Project: Hooded
Parson School of Design graduate Myles Loftin shared his photography project “Hooded” at the first antenna gathering earlier this year. Loftin seeks to employ his own life experience through art and dissect the racial profiling that occurs around black men and boys who wear hoodies.
Wanting to decriminalise and humanise the societal image of black males, Loftin is creating a bank of visuals that portray hooded men and boys of colour in a positive light that is in constrast to the negative perceptions of the media.
In a chilling demonstration of the systemic problem that Hooded addresses, Loftin showed footage of an ordinary Google search with the terms “three black teenagers” as compared to the results given for “three white teenagers”. It is this deepseated and historic imbalance of representation that Loftin aims to rectify through visual art.