The elusive concept of Blackness: through photography and film, artist hank Willis Thomas explores what it means to be black today.(PROFILE)

YOUNG BLACK MEN have the highest homicide-victim rate of any group in the United States. The statistic hit home for Hank Willis Thomas seven years ago, when his cousin Songha Willis was shot to death over a gold chain on a February night outside a Philadelphia nightclub.

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Working with Kambui Olujimi, Willis Thomas created a short film called Winter in America about the tragedy. But he didn't get a crew and cast for actors. Instead, Willis Thomas used toy cars and G.I. Joe-like dolls, some of which he'd played with as boy, to reenact the shooting.

The four-minute short film (available online at www.hankwillisthomas.com) is both a memorial and a hard-hitting critique of materialism in the "post-Black" era. A visual artist who works primarily in digital photography and film, Willis Thomas says the killing of his cousin remains his main source of inspiration.

"All my work is about what I learned and what I lost when the person closest to me was killed over a chain," he has written on his website.

Willis Thomas began taking photographs when he was 12. As the only child of Deborah Willis, a noted photographer and expert on the history of Black photography, he grew up immersed in a community of influential Black photographers in New York City, including Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. He spent his weekdays after school at Harlem's Schom-burg Center for Research in Black Culture, where his mother worked for 13 years. At 31, Willis Thomas has had his work published in numerous books and featured in exhibitions across the country. He has received prestigious fellowships and awards, including the 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography.

While his work largely deals with some aspect of "Blackness in this new age," Willis Thomas says he's aware that he is building on a legacy of Black photography that includes the work of Weems, Simpson and his mother. "I haven't contributed enough to put myself officially in their wake," he says. His work, however, is already a part of the permanent collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem and The International Center of Photography.