“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your
own voyeur.”
ARTIST BIO
I am a voyeur. Come and see me. I am Black and I am a woman: a double bind in America. My work reclaims this position as both subject and object of gaze, as a means of self-expression and catharsis.
We live within a culture shaped by surveillance, hypervisibility, and visual consumption. The masses crave not only physical, but also visual seduction. Photography becomes a space for constructing parasocial intimacy between subject and viewer. Through self-portraiture, I use makeup and thrifted clothing to build characters that embody the shifting facets of my femininity, sexuality, and emotional states.
In my work, I confront the aestheticization of womanhood and the discomfort embedded within it. By mashing personal experience through the grinder of the male gaze, I create images that examine beauty standards while exposing the contradictions of desire, visibility, and identity.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Destiny Williams is a Norfolk, Virginia based conceptual photographer whose work examines constructed beauty, Black womanhood, and emotional exposure within performance. Through manufactured imagery and self-portraiture, she inhabits shifting personas to interrogate gender roles and identity. Her practice engages W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, exploring the tension between internal identity and external perception. Drawing on the dramatic use of light associated with Caravaggio, she employs chiaroscuro to create psychologically charged and intimate images, often incorporating the recurring motif of clown makeup to evoke the never-ending performance of femininity and race.
Williams received an Associate of Applied Arts with a specialization in Photographic Media Arts from Tidewater Community College. Her work has been exhibited at the Suffolk Art Gallery and the Attucks Theater Art Gallery.
