Published by MACK in 2022, Contact High is both an artist’s book and a comprehensive presentation of D’Angelo Lovell Williams’s work to date. Across self-portraits and collaborations with community, Williams examines how desire is visualised and how the Black body is represented, placing Black queer lives at the centre of the image rather than at its margins.

The photographs take the form of narrative scenes: theatrical, dance-like, occasionally mundane, and attentive to the charged meaning of touch, gesture, and proximity. Sitters appear as lovers, caregivers, friends, family, ancestors, or shadows; these roles are not fixed categories but parts of a wider continuum of care, tenderness, vulnerability, and kinship. The title’s reference to heightened senses and intuitive movement reflects this emphasis on contact as both physical encounter and a way of knowing.

Williams’s approach is grounded in lived experience while remaining critically alert to questions of race, class, sexuality, gender, and intimacy. The resulting images connect personal perspective with collective histories and Black ancestral practices, allowing spirituality and quietly radical politics to coexist within carefully composed scenes. Crucially, the photographs make Black and queer voices the authority of their own representation, resisting the omissions and distortions of historical depiction.

At 104 pages in a hardcover volume, Contact High deserves the attention of collectors interested in contemporary photographic practices that join formal invention to questions of visibility, self-determination, and community. Its significance lies not simply in its subject, but in the reciprocal, dialogic structure through which that subject is pictured: bodies become sites of memory, care, performance, and relation.