The Changing Same is from the Sugarcane and Lightning series, which started in 2016. The journey, leading up to the photograph started in Oakland, to Louisiana, to Senegal. Burrell planned the trip after finding a series of letters written on behalf of his ancestors who were enslaved by the Confederate army during the Civil War in Louisiana. They were enslaved on sugar cane plantations in Zydeco country, the southwest side of Louisiana. Burrell went to Senegal to conduct additional research on a bill of sale that he found for an ancestor, Venus Senegal, his fourth great-grandmother. She came from Richard, Senegal, now a modern-day sugar cane plantation and conventional farming area. His visit to the farm coincided with a traditional slash and burn, a farming method where farmers clear land by cutting down vegetation ("slashing") and then burning it to create ash. Hundreds of farmers were in the field for the happening. It was a scene. And it was 2022. But it depended on one’s perspective. It was a look back to 1876. So the more things change, the more they stay the same, the changing same.

Adrian Burrell (b. 1990, Oakland, CA) is third-generation Oakland-based artist and storyteller, who utilizes photography, film, and site-specific installations to delve into the intricate intersections of race, class, gender, and intergenerational dynamics. His artistic lens converges on the exploration of kinship, diasporic narratives, and the nuanced relationship between place and belonging. Burrell hopes to be a model for other Black Americans of similar backgrounds to reimagine their narratives by drawing on the nature of memory and contending documentation of multigenerational histories.

Burrell lives and work in Oakland. Burrell’s work has been featured at the SF Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, SXSW, Photoville in New York, Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, BlackStar Film Festival, and in The New Yorker. Burrell was the S.F. Camerawork Juror’s Choice Award recipient (2019) and a YBCA Creative Cohort fellow (2021-22). He is also an alumnus of the highly coveted Black Rock Senegal Residency Program (2022). Burrell is a US Marine Corps veteran and graduated from San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in film. He earned his MFA from the Stanford Department of Art & Art History, where he lectured and served as the Black Graduate Student Community Outreach Chair. San Francisco Modern Luxury has recently named Burrell as a Bay Area and National Artist to Know Now. He is currently a visiting artist with Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts and a resident at SFFILM.