Black – Constellation

Black was born on October 17, 1980, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father Richard was a physician and a professor, and his mother MaryAnn was a nurse practitioner; both worked at Johns Hopkins University. As part of his research on the nervous system, Richard took Polaroids of oscilloscope screens and made short films of neurological activity. Richard accumulated a wide range of photographic equipment and experimented with it at home. This equipment later became part of Black’s first dark room. When Black was seven, his family moved to Houston, Texas. When he was thirteen he started shooting portraits of his friends with his father’s old Nikon. His father also taught him how to repair and refurbish vintage cameras, such as a Graflex Speed Graphic that Richard purchased from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

When Black was eighteen, he took a summer filmmaking course with director Kelly Reichardt at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. While there, he made a series of short 16mm films. He moved to San Francisco in 1999 to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with artists/filmmakers such as Todd Hido, Larry Sultan, George Kuchar and Henry Wessel Jr. In his final year of college, Black transferred to Cooper Union in New York City.