Photography is a way to pay tribute to the women who gave me life. A promise - to tell their stories.  My name is Tanya Morgan Dixon.  My mother desegregated her school in 1955.  My grandmother, a sharecropper, gave birth on an abandoned school bus.  Great grandma?  Born at the end of the Civil War at the height of Reconstruction.  Her mother, enslaved.  Every day I have to fall in love with the world on purpose -  as an outright protest against fear.  I want to tell new narratives, alternate endings, chosen adventures of Black people -  beyond the fences of fashion, sport and urban culture.  I care about delicate movements of courage, churning purpose, soulful repose, daily grit and I'm constantly admiring magic in the mundane.

 

I run a grassroots national health nonprofit called GirlTrek and photography has been an essential part of that movement-building.  Even still, I'm a newbie.  I sttudied with renowned war ad street photographer Peter Turnley in 2014.   I obsess daily over the photographs of Martha Cooper, Gordon Parks,  Bruce Davidson, Chester Higgins, Mary Ellen Mark and Jamel Shabazz.  I'm also inspired by a new generation of street photogramers, image activists like Noah Scialom (IG: @knowaphotographer) and Ruddy Roye (IG: @ruddyroye) and shaken to action by good writers like Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.

 

Hughes once talked about "sweet relief" and said, ""I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street - gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad songs, because you couldn't help being sad sometimes. But gay or sad, you kept on living and you kept on going. Their songs - those of Seventh Street - had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."  I would like to make photographs that have a pulse, that inspire people to keep going, to press on.  

 

Activistbeel hooks wrote, "“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.” 

 

Legendary NYC Street Photographer, Joel Meyerwitz believes, "A select few through time, are willing to go out into chaos with some high hopes of interacting with moments where life will become clarified.  They can welcome ambiguity and surreal."   I want to be that brave.  I'm also inspired by Bruce Davidson's approach - to slow down, create bonds, to see people, make contact and collaborate at arriving at truth.