Roger C. Tucker III
Our youngest daughter, Alexis, attended a Harvard Summer Program in Mali on African music and dance in 2007. She brought back this mask and I was looking for ways to incorporate it into a photographic composition similar to my photographic collages that include African masks.
I brought the mask to the beach one afternoon and hovered it over the ocean and the bathers on the beach and took this photograph. The Marvel Comics Black Panther movie by Ryan Coogler introduced the idea of Black Futurism in a unique way. Both visually and theoretically. This photograph could indeed be imagined as an African Space Ship visiting the Jersey Shore on a reconnaissance mission. Thus the name, MotherShip. The definition of a mothership is a large spacecraft or ship from which smaller craft are launched or maintained.
This photograph is also available in color.