Landscape as a Witness: Tisch Senior Makes use of Photography to Protect Black Lineage | by Robin Young | Feb, 2026

Photography as inheritance

Berry’s relationship with images started in childhood, when the digital camera was a relentless presence in her residence. Her grandfather filmed and photographed household moments, ultimately passing down his VHS camcorder to her. Later got here small digital cameras and disposables carried on journeys, early experiments that made the digital camera really feel much less like an object and extra like a companion.

“I’ve always had the camera around me,” she mentioned. “My grandpa recorded everything.”

Her first deeply private photographic mission was a portrait of him, created throughout a interval of social and political unrest in 2020 after the homicide of George Floyd. The picture mirrored each grief and resilience, formed by conversations about his experiences rising up as a Black man within the Deep South.

That second shifted images from interest to calling.

“That’s when it clicked,” Berry mentioned. “I realized I’m meant to tell stories about our lives.”

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The photograph that units the tone

Berry informed me that the teal bathing swimsuit portrait is her personal favourite picture in your entire mission. The topic, a buddy from highschool named Paris, stands framed by a floral backdrop that Berry and her topic struggled to maintain in place within the Missouri wind.

“It was a really windy day,” Berry mentioned, laughing. “We were trying to get the backdrop to stay up and not blow away.”

The vitality on set was intimate and joyful. They performed music, shared jokes and allowed the second to unfold naturally. Berry hardly ever directs her topics into inflexible poses. Instead, she watches for motion and character to emerge organically.

“I don’t want it to feel still,” she mentioned. “I want it to feel like there’s movement beyond what’s captured.”

That intention is seen within the ultimate picture. Paris’s smile feels alive. The wind turns into a part of the emotional texture, as if the {photograph} is holding a second mid-breath.

For Berry, that’s the level. Black life exists in movement, continually unfolding.

Movement as language

Berry’s relationship with motion comes from dance. Before images grew to become her major medium, she spent years dancing and continues to take action in the present day. She credit dance with shaping how she approaches image-making.

“Movement has been a part of my life,” she mentioned. “That’s why I go about my images the way that I do.”

Even her nonetheless pictures really feel kinetic, as if the topic existed in movement simply earlier than the shutter clicked and can proceed shifting afterward. The pictures don’t freeze Blackness. They lengthen it.

Missouri, household legacy and inventive roots

Although the exhibition sits in Manhattan, the origins of “Landscape as a Witness” stretch again to Missouri, Berry’s residence state. Several pictures had been photographed there, together with the teal portrait and the mission’s central picture that includes her sister.

Berry’s grandmother based one of many first built-in dance studios in Missouri, working from 1965 to 2020. Growing up surrounded by that legacy formed Berry’s dedication to documenting Black life.

“It was really important for me to showcase Black life in my photography,” she mentioned. “I saw how many lives my grandmother changed through art.”

Photography additionally grew to become a manner of preserving connection after leaving residence. When the household dance studio closed, common gatherings stopped.

“I went from seeing everyone every week to not seeing them anymore,” she mentioned. Photography grew to become a option to hold reminiscence and household shut.

Finding images by illustration

Berry’s path towards images shifted in highschool when she discovered about photographer Tyler Mitchell, an NYU Tisch alum recognized for his work documenting Black pleasure and reimagining visible narratives.

Seeing Mitchell’s work helped her acknowledge images as greater than a technical craft. It might be storytelling rooted in id and neighborhood.

Then, just like the sound of a shutter snapping into focus, all the things clicked, a second that felt particularly becoming for a photographer.

“That’s when it clicked,” she mentioned. “This is a calling. I’m meant to tell stories about our lives.”

For Berry, documentation isn’t just inventive observe. It actually is historic work.

Dreaming freedom and insisting on security

Berry describes “Landscape as a Witness” as each hope and a dream. When requested what that dream appears to be like like personally, her reply was direct.

“As a Black woman, all I can hope for is that I’m able to go outside and feel safe.”

Her work imagines areas the place Black ladies exist with out worry or doubt, free from the stress between self-perception and exterior notion.

“We have to not only perceive ourselves, but see the way others perceive us,” she mentioned. “That is a very hard way to live.”

NYU, expectations and actuality

Berry additionally spoke about navigating NYU as a Black pupil in a division the place illustration stays restricted.

“NYU advertises as this really liberal, diverse school,” she mentioned. “And then you get here and realize the Black population is such a small percent.”

She described not having a category with Black friends till her sophomore yr and changing into extra intentional about advocating for herself inside predominantly white areas.

“It made me grow. It made me resilient,” she mentioned. “I learned not just to ask, but demand what I deserve.”

Through that demanding, Berry has discovered a deeper freedom, not solely to advocate for herself, however to create the work she desires to create with out shrinking it for anybody else. Both of her sisters are NYU graduates, and watching them transfer by the identical establishment served as a reminder that she belonged there too. Their presence made the chance tangible. If they might do it, she might too.

That sense of belonging, of claiming house, echoes all through Landscape as a Witness. Although her work displays migration and motion, it’s also deeply rooted in residence. Berry typically thinks about what it feels wish to return residence from school throughout a break. The roads may look totally different. New buildings seem. Familiar storefronts disappear. The neighborhood shifts in small, noticeable methods.

“I go back home and things are so different,” she mentioned. “But the love is the same. The people are the same.”

For Berry, that continuity is a part of what panorama means. In her thesis, the land isn’t just surroundings. It is reminiscence. It is report. It is a quiet witness to the lives unfolding inside it.

And in documenting these lives, Berry holds onto a easy reality: what she captures in the present day, in Missouri, New York or anyplace else, in motion or stillness, turns into a part of what the panorama will bear in mind.