QUILADELPHIA • Exhibition at Hannah Traore Gallery Quiladelphia marks photographer and Philadelphia native Quil Lemons’ first solo exhibition. In this deeply introspective series, Lemons turns the lens inward—using his own body, psyche, and community as terrain for investigating the complexities of Black masculinity and queer identity. These images are not simply portraits; they are intimate excavations, offering a nuanced and unflinching reimagining of the Black male form. Quiladelphia resists stereotype and invites reflection, expanding notions of vulnerability, pleasure, and liberation. “I wanted to welcome folks into what it is to live life as a Black gay man. I let my camera navigate everything I see. When it came to shooting, I was letting people into my brain. It was not to make Black nudity and sex into art. Everything I embody is what these images are and mean to me. This is ME. Welcome to my brain.” – Quil Lemons Shot on film with a range of analog cameras, each photograph draws the viewer into Lemons’ world—a space both seductive and unguarded. With nods to the visual legacies of Lyle Ashton Harris, Mark Morrisroe, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Robert Mapplethorpe, Lemons builds upon a rich lineage of queer image-making, infusing these references with his own contemporary sensibility. Kink, fashion, intimacy, and kinship intertwine through motifs like fishnet, leather, and chains, creating a tactile language of queer sensuality that is as much about joy as it is about reclamation. Just over four decades after the onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Quiladelphia contributes to a vital lineage of work that reclaims space for eroticism and care within queer Black life. Through soft gazes, bare skin, and unapologetic presence, Lemons captures his friends—some lifelong, others newly encountered—who span a range of identities across queerness, transness, and heterosexuality. Models, artists, sex workers, and lovers all become part of his chosen family. They are not just subjects, but collaborators—fellow architects of a shared visual language rooted in intimacy, resistance, and truth-telling. “A lot of this is repression. Younger me would not even take these images. Half my family is Muslim and half Christian. To be able to do this took a lot of healing, self-acceptance, and bravery, to be able to just walk out of my house and be a Black gay person. I would truly rather die than to not live my life as freely as I do. I don’t want to die with what ifs and having questions as to if I was ever my true self.” – Quil Lemons This body of work continues and deepens Lemons’ ongoing exploration of self and community, seen in earlier series like Boy Parts—a meditation on gender fluidity and masculinity—and 6 7, a tender documentation of his grandmother’s birthday block party in South Philadelphia. Whereas previous projects centered familial and neighborhood life, Quiladelphia foregrounds a broader queer kinship. It is a visual love letter to a chosen family—sensual, raw, and multifaceted—opening portals into new, boundless ways of imagining Black life in America.