For more than a decade, Terrell has used the camera as testimony. His lens has followed world champions, grieving mothers, and entire cities under reconstruction. In 2019, he became the only African American photographer to win the World Press Photo Award, earning global recognition for his portrait of Claressa Shields, Shields Strikes Back.
But trophies aren’t the point. His work asks a harder question: What happens when representation becomes a business model, and truth gets licensed by the powerful?
That question drives his long-form writing and his current novel a philosophical and visual project mapping light as memory, resistance, and moral code.
His Substack, Everything Matters But Not Everything Matters to Everyone, functions as both archive and battlefield: essays, photo-notes, and investigative work on race, capitalism, and consciousness.
