The Forest

“In these photographs, a deliberate juxtaposition of dark and light exemplifies the complex nature of the black subconscious. Afraid and fearless at the same time, we rise.”

By the time she graduated from Duke University in May 2017, Danielle Mayes had become a very familiar presence at the Center for Documentary Studies, having taken numerous courses here in video, photography, multimedia production, and social change and activism. Danielle is tireless in her commitment to her vision, which she pursues with a technical felicity and exceptional creativity that opens up new space for considering black interiority and subjectivity. For these reasons and more, we nominated her for a Louis Sudler Prize in the Creative and Performing Arts—a prestigious annual prize at fourteen major universities, including Duke—and were not at all surprised when she won.