Softcover with dustjacket
25 x 23cm
160 pages
Quil Lemons’ first book QUILADELPHIA. A decade in the making, this is a mega photographic documentation and exploration of Black masculinity. The title is a portmanteau, a dedication to Lemons himself and his hometown.
Everything I am was forged by a city, a family, and the people who raised me. This book carries their imprint. Philadelphia gave me grit, ambition, and an understanding of where I begin. Quiladelphia is a dedication to that inheritance and to the worlds I’ve imagined beyond it.
Across ten years of photographs, I’ve been searching for ways to let Black masculinity breathe, to linger in vulnerability, intimacy, and the quiet states of being we so rarely allow to take center stage. To imagine what becomes possible when masculinity is free to be soft, beautiful, uncertain, and full of desire.
These images live somewhere between the person we are and the person we dream of becoming; between masculinity and femininity, pain and pleasure, performance and authenticity. I return to those places because they keep opening into something else. There is no single way to be, to love, or to inhabit a Black body.
With a foreword by Brontez Purnell, conversations with Santigold and Lyle Ashton Harris, and my essay African American Trade — What Is Trade?, this book holds so many of the questions that have carried me here.
