In the opening image of Eric Hart Jr.’s debut photo book, When I Think About Power, a figure sits, photographed in profile. Shirtless, with his chest facing away from the camera, the sitter—one of many that Hart calls a muse—looks over his shoulder with his chin resting in his hand and long acrylic white stiletto nails on the tips of each finger. The black and white full-bleed photograph is indicative of the entire series which revolves around Blackness, masculinity, queerness, and often, seemingly contradictory notions. But ultimately, it’s an investigation of what the 23-year-old was taught power is, what it isn’t, and how those things fashion an identity.

“I feel like if you’re wearing a stiletto nail and you’re not showing it off in that manner, you’re not proud of the nail,” the photographer says of the opening image, sporting the same style of nails during our interview. After growing up in a family where all the women got their nails done, he adopted the practice in what has come to be a visible marker of feminine power and an outward act of rebellion. “He’s not hiding the nail. But if you look at his face, if you look at the crease between his brows, there’s conflict there.”

In what he calls his first long-term series, which began in 2019, Hart excavates his own ideas about what it means to be a man and what it means to be powerful while offering imagery that departs from much of what he had been seeing in contemporary visualizations of Black masculinity. In the place of vibrantly colored, multi-hued mood boosters depicting “Black bodies on beds of flowers or Black bodies in colorful durags,” Hart’s black and white images (inspired partially by Dana Scruggs’s work) are contemplative and sober, depicting a grinning Black sitter bandaged up here, a figure holding a double-barrel shotgun at the viewer there, and three lithe, muscular men wearing white tights and acrylic nails in a third.

“I wanted to tackle the concept of vulnerability and power coexisting,” the Georgia-born, New York City-based image-maker says. “A lot of the works that I had seen just sent messages that were like, ‘let boys be soft, or let boys be fragile.’ I had never heard the conversation go further than those statements and also incorporate the notion that your fragility is power.”

This work became therapy for Hart. The inclusion of motifs like acrylic nails, choir robes, and church hats or lace, prompted him to do internal interrogations about his connection to those things. While acrylic nails were about powerful femininity in the ways of Catwoman or Florence Griffith Joyner, ornate Sunday hats and crosses were a visualization of religious authority. These were the things, in addition to the lace representing antebellum Southern Gothic style, that has helped to shape Hart.

“I had to write a lot and really think about what I was trying to say with this work because I think a lot of the concepts could give off ‘What is he trying to say here?’” Hart says. “But I was thinking a lot about what I was taught power was, what I was taught power was not, and how those things still exist inside me. I wanted to think about how I am exuding this in my life and how I am not exuding this in my life. It was about wanting to stand more in my power and wanting to be more vulnerable about my past and the things I’ve been taught.”

“When I Think About Power” is now available globally via Damiani.

This feature appears in the pages of VMAN 50: now available for purchase!