Four queer women defying the snow: Mikael Owunna's best photograph

Snow evokes the west, Europe, the far north - places that have historically been hostile to black people. So this is like an assertion: we're going to take this place for ourselves'

I shot this in Brooklyn in 2017. For four years, I had been working on a series about LGBTQ African immigrants in 10 countries, across North America, Europe and the Caribbean, but I had no group shots. I started thinking about how we interact with each other for support. I wanted to capture that.

I already knew Mai'Yah, the woman furthest to the right, from a shoot two years earlier. She said there were three other women in New York she was in conversation with who were also queer and African. From the left, they are Badu (who is Ivorian), Yewa (Nigerian) and Amadi (Nigerian). Mai'Yah is Liberian.