True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) is a chronicle of survival by trailblazing artist Zora J Murff.

Murff constructs a manual for coming to terms with the historic and contemporary realities of America’s divisive structures of privilege and caste. Since leaving social work to pursue photography over a decade ago, Murff’s work has consistently grappled with the complicit entanglement of the medium in the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race, often contextualizing his own photographs with found and appropriated images and commissioned texts. True Colors continues that work, expanding to address the act of remembering and the politics of self, which Murff identifies as “the duality of Black patriotism and the challenges of finding belonging in places not made for me—of creating an affirmation in a moment of crisis as I learn to remake myself in my own image.” Nuanced, challenging, and inspiring, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) is a must-have monograph by a rising and standout artist.

True Colors is the result of the inaugural Next Step Award, a partnership between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, with the generous support of 7G Foundation. An exhibition of the work will open at Baxter St in New York in November 2021.