STORY 00 — ORIGIN FREQUENCY "Project COUTUREBOY"

I begin with the worlds that shaped me. Not the ones I conquered, but the ones I survived, adored, feared, and folded myself into. The COUTUREBOY project lives in that quiet tension, a juxtaposition of the worlds I have yet to walk and the ones my feet already know by heart.
I pull from the iconography that raised me. The hyper-masculinity of my uncles, men who carried contradiction with the ease of well-worn linen. They were soft in ways they never named, men whose gentleness lived in the seams of their fashions. Cecil. Ivory. Melvin Sharp. Names that arrive like a litany, a prayer, a lineage of emotion, muscle, and memory.

And then there were the ones who held me closer, names held in my heart as secrets that energize the frequency: lovers, companions, men who touched the deepest part of my becoming. And my muses — D. Harris, J. Lollis, F. Sanders Jr., M. Wilcher Jr., C. Spain. Their physicalities enabled a sustained photographic exploration that stretches across decades. Every silhouette, every gesture, every private tenderness became part of my visual grammar. They taught me the language of intimacy long before I had the words for it.

I learned masculinity through a photographic lens — in Georgia backyards, in New York apartments, in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Bahia, under a sun-glazed heat, and in the quiet elegance of Parisian streets. Brazilian ease. Parisian chic. Two poles of beauty that taught me how a man can hold both sensuality and restraint without apology.

Project COUTUREBOY was born from all of this. A project shaped by bodies and memories, by the men who carried their frequencies into me. It is my way of saying, "I saw you." You shaped me. I am still becoming through the echoes you left behind, as I continue to see your elegance, your beauty, your quietude.

This was, and still is, the beginning.