Magic Hour

On the chair next to me sat a worn out copy of Toni Morrisson’s Beloved, a favorite which Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. told me he’s read at least three times. We were sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment which he’s been living at in Flushing, Queens, on the upstairs floor of a yellow and burgundy house museum dedicated to the work of Louis Ladimer. Ladimer was the inventor of the carbon-filament light bulb, an addendum and improvement to Thomas Edison’s original lightbulb. So the photographer is living in the house of someone who helped a great deal with the way we see, and in Elliott’s case, it seemed particularly apt. At his recent solo show in New York at Nicelle Beauchane, his photographs radiated with grace and elegance, a heightened sensitivity to form, rendering unexpected, complicated and beautiful images out of his everyday life.