Today we’d like to introduce you to Clevis Harrison.
Hi Clevis, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
As far back as memory goes, art has always been part of my life. When it came time to decide what to study in college, my father gave me simple advice: do what you love. That led to art, and eventually photography became the language that connected everything I was interested in: people, culture, music, history, movement, and memory.
One of the earliest introductions to the craft came through assisting photographer Cecil Williams. From there, photography opened in every direction: photojournalism, documentary work, weddings, events, and portraiture. There wasn’t much thought yet about having a particular style. The focus was learning how to observe, how to respond, and how to recognize what was happening in front of the camera.
At that age, music was a huge part of life, so photographing artists and concerts throughout South Carolina came naturally. What fascinated me was the energy, those few seconds when a crowd, a performer, light, movement, and emotion all came together.
One of those moments happened while photographing a sold-out concert headlined by Lil Wayne at the Colonial Center. Practically everyone I grew up with seemed to be in that building. When Wayne made his entrance, I stepped onto the stage and found myself only a few feet away from him. The only thought in my head was, get the photograph. The frame came together, and I was off the stage before security could stop me.
Something changed that night. It no longer felt like being a college student who happened to own a camera. There was an understanding that a photograph could become part of a collective memory. Everyone in that arena had experienced the moment, but the photograph had the ability to preserve it.
That realization pushed the work deeper.
While still in school, assignments began expanding throughout South Carolina and eventually into politics. That led to working as a personal photographer for one of the state’s most influential political figures, documenting major political events and photographing Barack Obama during an important period in American history.
At the same time, a body of work was developing around music and culture, photographing emerging and established figures in Southern music, hip-hop, radio, and entertainment. Those experiences taught me how to move quickly, read people, anticipate moments, and understand the difference between simply having access and actually making a meaningful photograph.
Eventually, that work led to Trey Songz. Over roughly five years, his life was documented across international tours, performances, family moments, and everything in between. He became like family, and the approach was never simply celebrity photography. The work was treated as an ongoing documentary, with just as much interest in the spaces between performances as the performances themselves: the quiet moments, transitions, relationships, and details that revealed something more human.
Photography eventually took me through more than 50 countries. It opened doors to worlds that would have been difficult to imagine growing up in South Carolina. But after years of hotels, airports, venues, and constant movement, exhaustion eventually set in. Distance was needed from the career that had been built in order to understand what photography was supposed to mean next.
So I stepped away and went home.
A few years later, another chapter began in Philadelphia, creating imagery and content around the career of a professional athlete while also helping with aspects of day-to-day management. Then COVID arrived, and like so many people, everything was reconsidered.
Eventually, Brooklyn became home.
New York became a period of dismantling and rebuilding. Politics had been explored. Sports had been explored. Music and entertainment had been explored. The more difficult question became: what does the work say when access and subject matter are removed?
That question led to a deeper investigation of beauty, memory, instinct, and personal history. Why do certain landscapes stay with us? Why does a gesture feel familiar? Why does a particular face, shadow, or moment pull at something we cannot immediately explain?
During that period, I met a photographer whose work existed in a visual world I had admired from a distance. Rather than focusing on everything already accomplished, he challenged me to return to the foundation: learn how to see, understand why the image is being made, and work with intention.
That became one of the most important lessons of my career.
The streets became a classroom. Photographs were made by following what naturally pulled at the eye rather than simply looking for something impressive. The process became less about producing images and more about developing subjects. School, experimentation, failure, and survival all became part of the education.
It was also one of the hardest periods of my life, and that difficulty forced the work inward. Memories of South Carolina, the people encountered around the world, the environments moved through, and the tension between where I came from and what I had experienced all began shaping the visual language.
Photography stopped being about taking pictures and became more about constructing meaning.
Now, the photograph feels like a meeting point between memory, observation, instinct, and intention. Sometimes it feels like aligning a series of elements: subject, environment, light, gesture, history, and emotion, until everything briefly exists in the right place.
Today, the work continues to evolve through personal projects, portraiture, editorial work, and ideas that can move between art and commerce without losing their emotional foundation.
Curiosity is still at the center of everything.
The goal is to keep developing a visual language strong enough that, one day, the photograph carries enough authorship that my name does not need to sit beside it.
Someone simply looks at the image and knows: that’s a Clevis Harrison.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Smooth would be the last word I would use.
There were periods when pursuing photography meant sacrificing almost everything. Accounts were emptied just to survive. Work stopped coming. The phone stopped ringing. Emails went unanswered. There were moments when it felt like everyone else was moving forward while I was sitting alone with the consequences of choosing a life that offered no guarantees.
That kind of isolation does something to you.
When no one is coming to save you, there is nowhere to hide from the question: how badly do you really want this?
Photography has given me some of the greatest experiences of my life, but it has also caused some of the deepest pain. The thing you love most has a way of exposing you. It reveals how much disappointment you can carry, how much uncertainty you can live with, and how much of yourself you are willing to give before you begin questioning whether you were ever built for it in the first place.
There were times when the sacrifice felt physical. Blood, sweat, tears, exhaustion, financial pressure, and moments of mentally breaking under the weight of trying to hold everything together. Not in some romantic idea of the struggling artist, but in the very real experience of wondering how you are going to survive and whether any of this will eventually mean something.
The hardest part was often not the lack of money or opportunity. It was sitting alone in my own head.
When there are no assignments, no applause, no recognition, and no one validating what you are doing, all that remains is you and the work. That is when the questions become much more uncomfortable.
Who are you without the access?
Who are you without the people you photographed?
Who are you when nobody is calling?
Are you still a photographer when there is nothing happening around you?
Those periods stripped away a lot of ego. They forced me to confront why I was making photographs at all.
At some point, the struggle stopped being about trying to get back to where I had been. It became about understanding who I was becoming. The difficult years forced me to slow down, look inward, revisit memories, confront fear, and rebuild my relationship with photography from the foundation.
There is something painful about realizing that passion alone does not protect you from suffering. Sometimes the thing you love most is also the thing capable of hurting you the most, because it asks you to reveal yourself completely.
But that pain also taught me endurance.
Not endurance in the sense of simply surviving, but learning how to remain curious when there is no reward, how to keep creating when no one is watching, and how to believe in a vision before there is evidence that anyone else will believe in it.
So when people talk about struggle, that word sometimes feels too small for what the journey can actually demand.
For me, it has been sacrifice, doubt, isolation, rebuilding, and repeatedly asking myself one question:
How much of yourself are you willing to give to become who you know you can be?
I’m still answering that.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
What I’m most proud of is the evolution. There was a time when success meant being close enough to an important moment to capture it. Today, the ambition is different.
The photograph should carry something forward.
A memory. A truth. A trace of history. Something about who we were, how we lived, and how we were changing.
The work I want to make now is less about creating images that simply exist in the moment and more about creating something that can remain after it, something that adds to the visual history of a people, a place, or a time.
If the work can make someone look closer, feel something, question something, or understand life a little differently, then it has contributed to progress.
That is what I’m chasing now: photographs that are beautiful, human, and intentional, but also necessary.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
Books and YouTube are probably the two resources I return to the most. Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act is one book I come back to, and on YouTube I spend a lot of time with SHOWstudio, National Geographic, HISTORY, Tatiana Hopper, and The Beauty Of.
Photography books slow me down and make me look more carefully. I spend a lot of time studying photographers like Koudelka, Roversi, Lindbergh, Parks, Webb, and Penn. I’m interested not only in the photographs themselves, but in sequencing, atmosphere, gesture, light, and the way a body of work creates its own language.
Film is just as important to me. I study directors and cinematographers like Nolan, Ritchie, van Hoytema, Deakins, Coogler, Spielberg, Scorsese, and Tarantino because of the way they build worlds, control pacing, use light, and create emotion through composition and atmosphere.
But history is probably the foundation underneath all of it.
History gives context to everything: photography, architecture, fashion, music, politics, land, culture, identity, even the way people move through a space. The more I learn about what came before us, the more I understand what I’m looking at now. It changes the way I see a person, a building, a landscape, or even a small gesture.
I’m interested in how civilizations were built, how cultures evolved, how people documented themselves, what was preserved, what disappeared, and who was allowed to tell the story. A photograph is never completely separate from what came before it.
YouTube has become a valuable resource because it gives access to interviews, lectures, documentaries, behind-the-scenes footage, and conversations that reveal how artists, filmmakers, historians, and thinkers approach their work.
I also look constantly at architecture, music, design, cinema, and everyday life because inspiration can come from anywhere.
More than anything, the real resource is curiosity. History gives that curiosity depth, and everything else gives it another direction to explore.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.clevisharrison.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clevisharrison
Image Credits
Clevis Harrison
