Just a Black girl…flying places, flying her drone, being fly
Combine Black feminist epistemologies, with golden era HipHop, and a love for the physics of flight shaped by Michael Jordan and Bessie Coleman…and you’ve got the ingredients to the Black Girl Fly of my drone storytelling...
Grounded in African-indigenous traditions of navigation, interdisciplinary Black studies training and, an aesthetic calibrated to see beauty in quotidian Blackness, the drone it extends my vision by adding an aerial perspective that can expose the beauty of Black communities to help us understand and appreciate the alchemy of Black placemaking.
Dr. Charity Clay is
a real Life Documentarian…
On the intro Mos Def & Talib Kewli’s classic 1998 Album Black Star, I was was first introduced to the concept of a “Real Life Documentarian” through a sample of Jazz Saxophone legend Cannonball Adderly proclaiming that “we feel that we have a responsibility to shine light, into the Darkness.”
Through teaching and engaging in Documentary filmmaking, street (pedestrian) & aerial (drone) photography, and mapmaking the mission is to elucidate Black stories for the world to see.
