At the turn of the last century, branding became a symbol of empowerment within black fraternities. Appropriating what less than a generation earlier had been a way of marking black slaves, branding served as a permanent signifier of allegiance and brotherhood, as well as a way of identifying those blacks able to gain higher education.

Today, branding remains a sign of strength and masculinity within the black fraternity. But it is the conflation of the history of cotton and the slave trade with advertising and the black male that Hank Willis Thomas explores in his series, B®ANDED.

Thomas’ work probes the intersection of corporate branding with the social and cultural ambiguity underlying the experience of the African American male, creating an apparent tension between commodity and race. He illustrates this close affiliation between what should be divergent elements in an image of a leaping athlete shackled by a ball and chain—the ball, in this case, being a basketball. And in another image, the Nike Swoosh is seen neatly branded on the head of a black male.

If it is not yet clear that Thomas eschews the notion of corporate exploitation, it is evidenced in a photograph from the funeral of a cousin killed in a robbery, the image overlaid with text appropriated from the MasterCard ad campaign, Priceless #1. Conditioned by pervasive media messages of the black male’s physical prowess, the viewer is confronted, in a set of intimate portraits, by the simple photograph of a black man crying, an image at once both personal and disquieting. Yet his statement is plain: we are more than this.

Thomas, whose work was featured in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue, 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers, was raised in New York. He received his BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He went on to earn an MFA in Photography and an MA in Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Thomas has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the US and abroad, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Artists Space, the Leica Gallery, Texas Women’s University, the Oakland Museum, the Smithsonian, the Anacostia Museum, the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life, the National Museum of American History, and the National Portrait Gallery.

His photographs have been featured in a number of books and publications, including Reflections in Black: A History of African American Photographers, Friendship, Black: A Celebration of a Culture, and The Spirit of a Family, by Al and Tipper Gore.