ARTIST STATEMENTS

2026

My name is Judah Marley, a Los Angeles-born photographer who is an incoming senior at NYU Gallatin, concentrating in photography, visual culture, media studies, and cultural analysis, where I study the intersection of visual culture and social dynamics. I come from a Jamaican father and a Persian Jewish mother, who are both immigrants. I grew up navigating and deconstructing the spaces between cultures, language, and inherited memory. My work emerges directly from that liminal place. Through photography, I deconstruct what the immigrant identity truly entails, not just the narrative of arrival but the quieter, complicated weight of what was left behind. My images explore generational trauma, grief, memory, and how family structures transform across borders and time. I work with archival material, searching through family photographs and documents, excavating what has been buried or forgotten, and placing them in conversation with newly created images to reconstruct the stories that were lost. The primary goal of my work is to amplify the voices of the voiceless, the people forgotten by history, those who were erased, but whose voices must be heard, especially now. I am interested in the photographs that were never taken, the stories buried under packed dirt, and the faces that history chooses not to remember.  At a moment when the stories of immigrants and their descendants are under threat, my camera becomes an act of resistance, a refusal to let erasure have the final say on who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. 

2025

I am a Los Angeles-born photographer who is currently a sophomore at NYU Gallatin, concentrating in photography and sociology, where I study the intersection of visual culture and social dynamics. I come from a Jamaican father and a Persian Jewish mother, who are both immigrants, and through my work, I deconstruct much of what the immigrant identity entails, focusing on generational trauma, memory, and grief while looking at how our idea of family has changed. The primary goal of my work is to amplify the voices of the voiceless, the people who have been forgotten in history, those who were erased, but have had profound political and cultural influence. 

2021

I come from a long line of strong women. Women who endured more than they should've despite our small statures and petite figures. Wars, revolutions, invasions, terrorism, things that we just see on TV, as a figment of our imagination. I decided to photograph them, long after their "peak", the pinnacle of their lives. I decided to photograph my mother after she came to America with her parents and little siblings. After she shared a room with her little siblings in high school. After she struggled to assimilate into Los Angeles culture. I photographed my mother after she had 4 children, a husband, and after she became a CEO. I photographed my grandmother after her husband was jailed after they escaped war and bravely brought their children here. After she moved back and forth from country to country, she became a school teacher in every single one of those places. I photographed her memories of her daughter, her grandkids, and her mother. Memory is a strange thing. It's something that we hold so close to us, something we cherish and value; but it gets stripped away from us. Slowly but surely our grasp on our memories loosens, and so does our grasp on reality. I hope to sharpen that line, I hope to make memory more familiar, less strange, and foreign. Foreign like us. Maybe memory is supposed to be strange. Maybe it's supposed to be something we ponder about. Again, time is subjective.