Many of Lawson's photographs result from chance encounters, while others are meticulously planned and searched for. While some of her subjects are photographed within their own home, with their own possessions, others aren't, instead utilizing the locations of friends or family members and bringing in external props to set the scene. Yet it is through this controlled randomness of collaboration which emerges a hybrid realm of lived and imagined realities, a foregrounding and exalting the everyday movements, spaces, and experiences of Black life.

Lawson recounted meeting the subject of this photograph, Ms. Bell, to Jenna Wortham for an article in New York Times Magazine:

A few months ago, the photographer Deana Lawson and her family were driving to an art opening in the Inglewood neighborhood of Los Angeles when Lawson spotted a garage sale out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to pull over, but her 19-year-old son was tired, and he balked. The family passed the sale again on their way back home, and this time, Lawson insisted. When she met an elderly woman tending to the sale, she knew immediately that she wanted to photograph her.

Her name was Ms. Bell, and she offered Lawson a peek into her living room. It was overflowing with ceramics, old dolls and other miscellaneous objects she had collected over the years. Ms. Bell said that her neighbors often gave her trouble about her house, complaining about what they saw as detritus cluttering up the lawn and sidewalk. But Lawson was enchanted. She experienced an overpowering sense of déjà vu. “Your living room is the space in my dreams,” she told Ms. Bell. They exchanged numbers, and a few days later, Lawson showed her some of her photographs. Ms. Bell liked them and agreed to have her portrait taken.

On the appointed day, Lawson arrived with her gear — lights and her medium- and large-format cameras — and together she and Ms. Bell started arranging the room for the shoot. Lawson often asks her subjects to do “strange things,” like posing with babies who are not their own, doing gymnastics moves in little to no clothing or wearing outfits that she supplies. She never knows how people will respond to such requests. “It’s not like I’m working with models who expect artists to come to them with weird ideas,” she told me. “Usually people are like, You want me to do what?”

Ms. Bell was amenable to Lawson’s suggestions; the exchanges between them were warm and open, perhaps because they are both Aries, or perhaps because Ms. Bell grew up in Louisiana and her Southernness found kinship with Lawson’s down-to-earth demeanor. At one point, Lawson recalls, Ms. Bell told her she was blessed. “There’s something about you that felt OK to let into my home,” Ms. Bell told her. Even at 85, Ms. Bell was completely game — to experiment, to go deep, to be seen, for the length of the session.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/magazine/deana-lawson.html