What is the weight of a young black man's gaze? Who does it trigger? What does it want to say? What is he trying to say? We will never know for certain what more Desmond Amofah wanted to communicate—this week, the body of the popular YouTube gamer was found in Manhattan's East River—but we can hazard a guess.
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Online, he was known as Etika. He garnered a degree of fame for his charismatic videogame reviews on YouTube and live Twitch streams. It was no secret that the 29-year-old struggled with mental illness, and recently his behavior had become more worrisome to friends and fans. A number of comments in the course of the last year often put him at odds with his devoted following, which he'd named the JoyCon Boyz (a winking reference to the Nintendo Switch controller). Allusions to suicide, on his YouTube channel and in Reddit forums, had previously sparked concern as well. On the surface, Etika embodied a pinnacle of social media success, but his actions counteracted that narrative. The truth, the less convenient account, is that stars sometimes metabolize celebrity in much more complicated ways.
Etika disappeared last week after uploading a since-deleted video in which he admitted to suicidal thoughts and discussed the mirage of digital fame. "One thing I didn’t realize was that the walls were closing around me so fast," he said. "Let my story be one that advises caution on too much of the social media shit, man. It will fuck you up and give you an image of what you want your life to be, and it can get blown completely out of proportion, dog. Unfortunately, it consumed me."
Jason Parham is a senior writer for WIRED. Depth of Field is his weekly dispatch about culture's most searing current images.I first caught sight of Etika's image on Twitter, via a missing persons post by the NYPD, and immediately thought of the photographer Dawoud Bey and how the portrait-style angle is reminiscent of his work. Bey's portraits—and the subjects within, who are almost always black—coolly spellbind the senses. They are stares and poses and gestures full of emotional volume. They do not scream for attention, but demand it all the same. There's a calm confidence saturated within, an internal velocity. That's what draws the viewer to Etika's gaze. The image is not seeking a narrative of humanity—that increasingly trite, misused genre of identity-making we recklessly apply to black people—but a language of presence. It is an image of quiet force. It says simply: I am here.
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Etika's gaze on YouTube, with its mesmerizing depth of field that captures the essence and emotions in every moment yet remains unceasingly märkliche – it is a silent force infused within his videos.
