Sharifa "Shay": Photographing Liberation Through the Lens of Shayshotz
Written by Adriana Reyes
Published on July 9th, 2026
Amongst the five boroughs, Queens is the melting pot of culture and diversity. This phrase has been reverberated several times throughout my childhood and adolescence and if you spend more than a day here, you start to resonate with it. When I reminisce on my childhood in Queens, I’m stepping onto the concrete steps outside my apartment, turning the corner to see the older women settled in front of the laundromat with their cafecito. I think about store runs to the deli (not a bodega if it’s not run by Caribbeans), standing in line with my iced tea ready to order my everything bagel with cream cheese. I sit with it and feel the culmination of my community, every ounce of the love poured into every authentic cuisine option, families from every region of the world, and communities full of vibrancy.
Queens was the perfect place to grow up as a young brown girl in New York City, regardless of what “type of brown” you were labeled or coded as anywhere else. For young girls like Shay and I, Queens was the only place where the concept of identity was respected. Born and raised in the heart of Southside Jamaica, Sharifa “Shay” is a Guyanese interdisciplinary political artist, photographer, and “cultural architect,” as she eloquently describes it.
“It’s someone who is archiving it all, creating with the purpose of archiving. So not just thinking through what existed by reading something from the past, with different components of our culture, actually making a platform space to jump off of,” Shay said. Community is a strong value of hers, and it reveals itself in the work. “That’s where the archivist part of it comes from, where it’s like ‘yeah we have this identity, and we have to have ways to be excited about it, but what are we doing to culminate an understanding about liberation that we can all latch on to?’” Shay defines this title as digesting cultural history and working to preserve and archive it through her art. Shay’s exposure to photography started in her early years as her father was a videographer, and her early formative years were spent surrounded by the medium. This moment is where her desire to document her history began.
Queens was the perfect place to grow up as a young brown girl in New York City, regardless of what “type of brown” you were labeled or coded as anywhere else.
Her photo series “Masala No Chai” highlights her desire to represent authenticity as she showcases the beauty within Caribbean and West Indian immigrant communities grown here in the pockets of Queens that have not severed as a result of gentrification. Within this series, Shay is emulating the structure of 1950s diner photoshoots with her own West Indian flair. This is not purely just a celebration of culture but a direct reference to the western representation of femininity while also distinguishing Caribbean communities from one another.
Her photo series “Masala No Chai” highlights her desire to represent authenticity as she showcases the beauty within Caribbean and West Indian immigrant communities grown here in the pockets of Queens that have not severed as a result of gentrification.
In regards to the series she explained, “The title itself is because Caribbean people use masala across the board but we don’t drink chai [historically]… My work began because I wanted to differentiate who you are as a Caribbean from this broader narrative that we’re the same across the board. For African people they have to fit in a box that belongs to the African diaspora; Indian people look towards the South Asian diaspora. I want our people to sever our need to associate with our ties that are far removed.” Shay’s discussing a phenomenon of homogenization that many young immigrants experience and have to combat in our all-American culture. Shay recognizes the way Americans digest identity as a very limited understanding that defines us by our colonial ties.
She explained, “I’m going to put it quite frankly, I didn’t grow up around white people. I didn’t have an identity struggle that I think a lot of Caribbean people here [in America] have where they lose their culture and then they one day wake up and are trying to find it again. But I think there are some ways it’s too late to figure out who you are when it comes to culture and conformity because there are no elders around until your culture becomes diluted, like, we were just talking about America… you’re going to say ‘oh, well my culture has to be packaged in a way that could be mass produced and easily digestible’ and that’s what we’re watching.”
Shay’s referring to the culture of commodification and promotes the idea of us resisting our culture becoming commodified. She’s not discouraging those who have a diasporic experience with their identity from rediscovering their roots, but rather the opposite. She’s encouraging everyone to start now, otherwise their culture is at risk of being lost. Her intentions to shoot this series in a small family-owned roti shop reflect the culture built in New York City she has known her entire life.
She’s not discouraging those who have a diasporic experience with their identity from rediscovering their roots, but rather the opposite.
Her photo series “Coming to America” is the most emblematic of her desire to authentically represent the beauty within Caribbean communities that she was raised around. She’s combatting the notion that depicting our liberation involves only depicting our struggle, suffering, and pain. Simultaneously, she believes in us acknowledging the pain first and foremost. It’s one of the main reasons why the subjects of her work are historically marginal groups at different intersections. She elaborated, “So instead of these cultural things that are very much relying on a fairly surface level understanding about the Caribbean like the drinks that we have and the food we share and this conflation that we have [between culture and liberation]… so something pointing toward more enriching Caribbean things… that’s what we’re watching people, like you said, latching on to the concept of playing dominos and the beaches because that’s all they get.”
Shay identifying herself as a “cultural architect” embodies all that her work encompasses. Research, cultural digestion, and proper representation. Shay has dedicated her craft to the process of liberation. And she understands liberation is a process– that resistance doesn’t manifest immediately or in the most overt ways. Shay understands the nuances of being an immigrant activist, as she’s empathetic to the trauma response that comes from visibility. “I could have done commercial work. The people I was closest to were people working in the film industry, or modeling, or on Broadway,” she stated.
This is one of the main reasons she’s dedicated herself to doing smaller community efforts alongside her artistic and larger endeavors. As part of her efforts towards showcasing that liberation can happen on a small scale, she’s taken the time to host workshops with New York City high school students focusing on exposure to the arts and its utilization for mental health and processing deep traumas. Many of these girls are coming from families of immigrants and refugees, and Shay speaks emphatically of her experience of getting to work with them.
She said, “Something I will touch on that’s not in my more public work is I’ve been working deep in southside with black and brown girls typically through a program in which [we help] them work on their conflict resolution, build more confidence to help them stand up for themselves… I think for me this is what I’ve been the most proud of with my work so far because it wasn’t intentionally supposed to be art-related. And then I was like ‘well what do you guys want to do career wise?’ And a lot of them were like ‘I love singing, I really love photography,’ and I was like ‘Oh we have a room full of artists? Period.’” Shay continued to work with these girls for the next following months of the school year, and eventually helped the girls produce student films they presented to one another. She said, “I opened up 15 girls to our future. Possibility and that’s what matters more than any brand deal or any contract of liberation someone can write and be unserious about it like no it’s not finite.”
Shay has dedicated her life to liberation in all facets, and it’s vital we recognize the artistic contributions she’s made towards solidarity.
Shay’s work centers community-led resistance across the diaspora while deconstructing notions of time and labor injected into our being by colonization. Each project reflects the reality of living as a person from the Global South: being from everywhere and nowhere all at once. These visual stories challenge reductive, apolitical narratives and invite the viewer to develop new systems of collective care, implement accessible abolitionist practices, and remain in an ongoing pursuit of liberation.
To view more of her work online, you can follow her on Instagram @shayshotz and @brukoutmedia.
Adriana Reyes is a visual artist, writer, curator, and New York native. Born and raised in Astoria, her work focuses on the experience of young women of color and their navigation through identity and politics. She became a published playwright at 15 years old with her piece “Too close to home” through the nyc based non-profit LEAP on stage and went on to receive her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts at State University of New Paltz. She studied painting with a minor in Latin American studies and has since utilized her position within the art space and as a journalist to platform other Caribbean and Latin American artists.