“I’m attracted to the truths that emerge through looking at photographs abstractly,” Fields told me earlier in August, just as she had concluded her residency at Fountainhead in Miami. The intimacy of the images in Fields’s photo-manipulated installations work to enhance and redistribute an archive of Black openly queer subjects across the 20th and 21st centuries to a larger audience. Fields’s images are culled from a personal archive of Black queer relationships. She procures these images from eBay, family photographs, submissions from strangers, or institutional archives like the Faulkner Morgan archive in Kentucky. These photographs, while blown up and sometimes painted over, preserve the temporal and domestic evidence of a photograph as a personal object in her work. Her work acts as material evidence contradicting the pristine historical records of the time;  such as advertisements, films, and institutional images that minimize the visibility of Black subjects, let alone Black queer lives. 

At the time of her residency at Fountainhead, Fields’s archive has around 300 objects in it that also include some early daguerreotypes that she plans to work with in forthcoming projects. The artist developed her signature style while in graduate school at Pratt. There, Fields began dipping her printed photographs in wax and was drawn to how the process increased the opacity of the image—becoming a metaphor for how these often-overlooked lives moved through space, seldom seen.

To produce the work, Fields scans her images at the highest resolution and then duplicates the image digitally to crop and enhance features of the photograph that attract her eye. The photographs are mounted onto a durable surface, like aluminum, to then be manipulated further with wax, painting, and ink. These manipulations by Fields demonstrate the artist’s hand and interest in the photograph in that we see the image through Fields’s eyes, and in so doing view it with a tenderness that may not be present with most audiences.