Avion Pearce Is Envisioning Hidden Histories

“I mean so much of history is fabrication anyway, right?” says NYC-based photographer Avion Pearce. She’s explaining the story behind her latest visual project, Shadows. “I wanted to have some fun.”

With a deep personal love of history, Pearce has always been inspired by the countless period films she’s consumed over the years, and pretty much anything historical fiction. While doing research and making images for this series, which she describes as “pretty” and “reflective of the lost eras of Black history,” she felt like the images weren’t fully tied to the personal story she wanted to tell.

Suffice it to say, the past year has been remarkable in many many ways, most of them terrible. But it’s also been marked by some head-scratcher celebrity pairings that provided welcome distractions from the news: Shailene Woodley and Aaron Rodgers, Bennifer 2.0, and, perhaps best of all, Katie Holmes and Emilio Vitolo Jr. We’d just like to thank the two of them for generously sharing parts of their journey with us, the public. Theirs was the platonic ideal of celeb relationship trajectories: first, the Daily Mail alerted us to the actress’s budding romance with pasta royalty. Before long, drama surrounding his previous relationship arose. Then: a PDA tour, followed by more rumors of trouble in paradise. And yesterday, news broke that the unlikely duo had officially split. We are pro-Katie Holmes being happy and pro-carb, so hopefully both parties rebound with other beautiful people soon. For now, we raise a glass to their quarantine romance.

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