Men in Motion

Why Color Needs to Move

Every man I’ve photographed in this series has said some version of the same thing when he sees the finished images: “I didn’t know I could look like that.”

That response tells me everything about why this project exists.

What Men in Motion Is

Men in Motion is a portrait series within the More ∞ Joy practice, focused specifically on men in expressive color and movement. It began with a question: what happens when we apply the same dopamine-dressing philosophy — choose the color your body wants, build a wearable look, go outside and move — to men, who are rarely invited into this kind of self-expression?

The answer: they light up. Every single time.

Masculinity doesn’t reveal itself in stillness. It reveals itself in movement.

The Men I’ve Photographed

Nate, the engineer and meditator, who first appeared in the More ∞ Joy world in Cerulean Blue at ArtPrize and came back the following year in a Viking-inspired forest palette — Moss Green and Brazil Nut and Palomino Gold — and walked into Riverside Park at dusk looking like he’d grown there. When he grabbed a walking stick from the forest and started moving, the clothes stopped being clothes.

Dustin, who builds machines by day and came to the Grand Rapids Art Museum in light-dusted Burgundy on a free Thursday night, moving through the galleries as if they belonged to them. The color wasn’t loud. It was intentional.

Nick, the finance professional who chose Red Violet at a Tuesday night swing at Rosa Parks Circle, where the logical part of his brain turns off and flow takes over. In that color, boldness and introspection met in him — not as contradiction, but as integration.

These are not outliers. These are what happens when you give a man permission to try on a color he would never buy himself.

Why This Matters

Men are rarely invited to explore what they look like in joy. Fashion culture either tells them to disappear into neutral basics or to perform a very specific version of visible masculinity. Neither of these is the full story.

Color is a bodily experience before it is an aesthetic one. When the right color lands on a man’s skin — when it matches the warmth in his eyes or the particular quality of light he carries — his posture changes. He takes up more space. He moves differently. That shift is what I’m photographing. Not the color. The permission.

Book a Men in Motion Session

If you’re a man who has ever been curious about what color you’d choose if no one was watching — or if you know a man who comes alive when he moves — reach out. It takes two sessions. Each is 1-2 hours, beginning with a color discovery process, and is then photographed outdoors at sunset.

→ Book a Power Portrait Session