Join Khary Mason and Romain Blanquart, founders of the Detroit-based community arts initiative Capturing Belief for a conversation about the role of photographs in creating and maintaining a sense of Black identity and the importance of experiential learning opportunities in the arts for youth. This talk will be held inside the ongoing exhibition What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life.  

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life.

Romain Blanquart was born in France and has called Detroit home since 2002. He worked as a visual journalist for 25 years, 16 of these years documenting life in the Motor City on staff at the Detroit Free Press newspaper. After producing Living With Murder, a documentary film about the toll of homicides on Detroiters, a city whose residents lived through over 3,300 homicides between 2003-2012 and seeing how many lives one murder shatters, Romain started looking at how he could contribute to preventing young people from doing things that would take away their chance of finding purpose and growing up into healthy, productive and fulfilled adults. In 2016, with his friend, Detroit homicide detective Khary Mason, they founded the Detroit-based initiative Capturing Belief that offers young people a mix of experiential learning opportunities in the arts to strengthen visual, written and oral communication skills inspiring them to embrace their natural curiosity by exploring community through storytelling while embarking on journeys of self-discovery.

Khary Mason was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He is a former Detroit Police homicide detective. In 2020 Khary retired after serving 22 years. Looking back on his experiences, Khary often remarks on how altitude and the passage of time have given him a greater understanding of the world he seeks to change. In 2002 Khary’s wife gave him his first camera, many years would pass before Khary realized that his emerging art practice was beginning to lay the foundation in examining the visual and written language of self defense through the art of storytelling. By studying his own lived experience, Khary was able to identify a causal link between stories being created / told by the individuals depicted in them, and their ability to inform the storyteller’s, and audience’s belief in what is possible. In 2016 Khary, and Romain Blanquart launched Capturing Belief (CB), a Detroit based non profit that uses visual literacy and creative writing as instruments allowing students to understand: “No one should be able to tell your story better than you” KM