My name is KELVIN SMALL III, and I make photographs as a way of building worlds. Film slows me down in a way nothing else does. Rolling it onto the reel in the dark, hoping I don’t mess up the loading, waiting for the chemistry to breathe on the negative, pulling a print out of the tray with wet fingers, it feels like watching an image take its first breath. Every print carries a flaw, a piece of dust, or a slip of light, and I’ve learned to let those things live inside the work. They remind me the photograph is alive, not a perfect surface.

That is the space where I build. I’m not just recording what is in front of me, I’m shaping something that feels like memory, dream, and myth pressed together. My current project, BLISS VOL III (Divine Misery), is where all of this lives most fully. It breaks itself into chapters, cityscapes, self-portraits, and ethereal portraits that lean into horror, spirituality, and the dualities I walk through every day. It is rooted in being Black in America, and at the same time, it’s about the way pain forces change, the way transformation hurts before it heals.

I want the work to move beyond the frame. Some people will see struggle, others might see themselves, and maybe someone will feel permission to imagine a world they’ve never thought could exist. If my photographs give that spark, even for one person, then they’ve done what they needed to do.

I am not stopping here. I want to turn BLISS VOL III into a book, something people can hold and sit with, not just view for a moment. I am working toward my first solo exhibition, where my images can breathe as an environment instead of fragments. And in the city I live in, West Palm Beach, I want to one day build a photography school, a space for young artists to learn film, to mess up, to print, to dream, and to know that their visions matter. That is the legacy I’m chasing with my name, my work, and my life.