Jefferson’s work breathes narrative into forgotten and unknown histories, while also challenging existing narratives. Starting with her “Birthright Series”, as well as with her “Veiled Series”, Jefferson has captured reflections of her ancestors by focusing her lens on her own four children and immediate family.

By creating compositions that seem to emerge from nothing - while also referencing traditional wet-plate photo processes - Jefferson’s work asks us to think both about lost photographic histories as well as the artist’s own very personal loss of family history. Photos of the BIPOC community are few and far between in the historical record, and by using this obscure process, Jefferson is bringing these stories to the forefront. Jefferson’s work asks us to engage with how the BIPOC community doesn’t have representation across photographic history in the way that white communities do. But this is also deeply personal, because black and brown bodies have lost their personal histories, almost wiped away, because of who could wield a camera.

Jefferson’s unique aesthetic is conceptually anchored to the process she references. These images would have almost magically appeared if Jefferson was using the traditional printing process. The miracle of watching a photograph appear from the darkness of a bath of reeking chemicals is not without enchantment. It is as if Jefferson’s portraits themselves mimic this, almost pulling into view, first from an inky blackness, and then suddenly each a part of the artist herself. Jefferson’s lens reclaims a space where her family and families like hers werenever allowed, and allows her to advocate for a new history through this representation.