Episode 6, July 26, 2025
Russell Frederick
Photography
Russell Frederick is a Brooklyn-born self taught visual activist of Afro-Panamanian heritage who has been photographing thirty years. He is best known for his visual narratives of the African diaspora. Especially the images of his hometown of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. His documentation of Bed Stuy started in 1999 after he took an intro to B&W photography class in 1997 at the International Center of Photography. After the first day of class Russell knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life and he never looked back. At this time he was working in healthcare and in nursing school. A career as a nurse would be steady work but a career as a photographer had much more longterm value and fulfillment to Russell. His mission with his camera was to shift the negative perspectives some people had of humans of African descent and marginalized communities with positive images done with cultural nuance and humanity. Unable to attend photography school full time, Russell immersed himself in studying photography at book stores, critiquing album art at record shops and photographing voraciously in the late 90’s into the early 2000’s. Besides this, he was very fortunate to befriend some industry giants as he was aggressively pursuing photography to learn from them.
