Traditionally, a photographer imposes their vision upon the subject as the world is shown through their eyes. This series flips that notion on its head, exploring the intersections between photography, performance, gender and the right to control how a person is seen. Working collaboratively with trans and non-binary people, I gave direct creative control to those who have been historically misrepresented. This series shows that by sharing control of the image, the image’s control can be ethically managed. All images are co-owned by the subject and myself.
Lewis
MUA: Izzy Stetter
"I think a lot of people view being trans or non-binary as a struggle or as something associated with suffering. Whilst it is true that being misgendered, growing up not feeling comfortable in who you are and having to navigate a world full of transphobia and a society not ready to fully accept us is hard and can be painful, being trans is also an incredibly joyful experience. Being trans is about being who you are, no ifs, no buts, no compromises. Being able to treat gender as a site of joy, play, and resistance is beautiful."
Lewis
CH
"In these images, I wanted to comment on the way that trans people are often made the ‘subject’, with our own viewpoints and experiences ignored, and how some people choose to portray and view trans people negatively. Our rights, and even our humanity, seem to always be subject to some sort of ‘debate’. The societal ‘trans panic’ which has been going on in this country over the past 5-10 years can - and does - lead to very serious, and often dangerous, real-life repercussions for trans individuals."
"To be ‘seen’ – in the literal sense – as a trans person is a double-edged sword. I think everyone wants to be seen for who they are, and nobody should have to hide anything about themselves. The trans community is a proud and vibrant one, made up of incredible human beings. Coming out, and living as your true self, is not only liberating - it is also life-saving for many trans people.
When you are ‘seen’ in society as a trans person, however, this can lead to all kinds of awful things happening to you, as I have experienced for myself. How can I be visibly trans in a world where to be so puts me in danger? I want to be seen; I want to be safe. I can't be both right now, but I’m fighting back. These images, for me, are about what that fight looks like, and how it affects me.
These images are an attempt to show you who I am, without showing you who I am."
CH
"When we think of inclusion and exclusion, we often automatically think of institutional projects to advance ‘equality and diversity’. Sometimes, when the institution is especially in touch with their Gen-Z focus group, they might even call it ‘diversity and liberation’. Whilst these projects are, more often than not, a product of the very real passion for justice and good intentions of the people who are asked to run them, they are plagued by the same sterile, bureaucratic institutional structures which reproduce the exclusion in the first place.
Institutions love to churn out endless guidelines and documents about correct use of language and how to include specific minorities in working groups, which gives a sort of surface sheen of inclusion, but the harsh reality is that many minority groups find themselves spoken over and tossed aside in these meetings. When these groups decide to work on their own on advancing equality and inclusion outside of the oppressive supervision of senior managers, who act as if the most basic demands of the group are ‘at odds within the institutional context of the university’, the work is tossed aside and deemed invalid. This is the reality that trans people find themselves in at the university. I am the current trans welfare officer for the student LGBT Society in our student union, and I genuinely believe that LUU LGBT+ society can do more to advance queer liberation at the University in a single night with a jockstrap and a half empty bottle of poppers than the University has done in an entire year.
I have had a complicated experience with the university; I am in a constant flux of being excluded and included at the same time. I spend one week petitioning for the basic rights of trans people on campus and turn up to lectures the next as if nothing happened. This project was a fun way of looking at my experiences here and poking a little but of fun at what seems like a never-ending performance of being a student and having to navigate this silly little university. Every day I put on my silly little shirt and my silly little hat, and I walk into a silly little fine art studio and I open my silly little emails about diversity and inclusion.
If you would like to find out more about my art about landscapes, mountains, god, religion, rolling around in the mud and the colour blue, please visit my Instagram page @chris.txs, or you can contact me at chris.angelominas@gmail.com"
Chris
Context from Joe.
To give context to my own relationship to this project, I need to explain why photography interests me as a medium. The qualities of a photographic image have been built up by nearly 200 years of social, political and technological histories, and lots of which involve the concept of truth. Historically, a photograph has been culturally embedded as a form of evidence, because if something appears in front of a camera, then it was there. Often, this idea holds up fairly well. If you saw a picture of a man sat a bus stop, you’re fairly well inclined to think that particular man was sat at that particular bus stop at some point in history. The light from the sun bounced off the man and bus stop into the camera and produced a signifier of his being there with an indexical link to it for good measure. So, photography is imbued with this strong link to reality, and you can closely study this visually accurate reproduction of reality as well. You can zoom into a photo on your phone, or handle and analyse a print to better understand it. It’s not a big leap to make in saying that you can study reality from a photo to learn more about the truth of reality. It helps as well that the camera is a machine, and machines record things empirically, and empiricism has been the West’s favourite route to finding truth since God died and reason took its place. Well, lots of people seemed to think this, so this must be the case – photos quote truth. Photos are used in court as evidence to put baddies in jail, so photos in this sense are very useful. It seems in at least a few instances, photos empirically proving truth must be a great thing. Everyone’s favourite fruity voiced art critic John Berger said in an essay that the camera has replaced the eye of God. However, that very same eye of God was used in the colonial era to prove empirically that, due to the shape of their heads, black people were less evolved than white people. A photograph does not tell the truth. It can appear as an argument for a claim, but it is a selected instant of time chosen to prove a point, out of infinite other moments. It is a specific re-presentation of a reality, hiding under a veil of truthfulness that was given to it by its visual accuracy and social uses as evidence. This is why photography interests me so much, because it’s an opinion disguised as a fact.
This makes photographic representation a very dangerous thing, in a way that’s a lot more sinister than in other forms of representation. You can pass off a horribly misguided and damaging opinion of someone as truth, and it is less likely to be questioned because that’s the nature of a photograph. And instantly photography becomes a semi-invisible form of putting power over other people. And it’s very real to feel this on the day to day, if one of your friends takes a picture where you look a bit weird, you might not want them to hang on to it. You lose a degree of control over the way you present yourself to the world when someone misrepresents you. Yet, controlling how you are received by the world is, unfortunately, a privilege. And that privilege has primarily been held by straight, white, cisgendered men.
Quick side note - I bet you’re thinking ‘hang on a second – He’s a straight, white, cisgendered man! How come he’s putting on a project about trans and queer people?’ Well I’m glad if you are thinking that because it’s really important, but I’m going to leave that to the wayside for now because I’m going to keep talking about this for a moment.
So, controlling representation is a privilege. This is an idea that I find absolutely fascinating in a very broad sense, and one aspect of culture that is heavily embezzled with presentation and identity is gender. I agree with Judith Butler in thinking that gender is a performance. A performance that, as a cisgendered person, I don’t tend to notice as I feel comfortable enough with the rules society has dictated for me. So it stands to reason that people who don’t feel comfortable in these preordained performances will be more acutely aware of them than I would. Yet it just so happens that these people, trans and non-binary, have been historically demonised by misrepresentations. There is a huge empty space for sharing new ideas about performance, identity and image that has been kept empty by patriarchal forces for the longest time, and that space is just starting to be explored. And it’s an amazing space.
Now, coming back to my own positionality as straight, white, cis guy. What gives me the right to impose my vision as photographer upon such an historically misrepresented social group? Nothing. I couldn’t say whether I have that right. But instead, I have been able offer a platform where trans and non-binary can take control over how they are seen. I have learned about these processes around photography through academic study and as a practitioner. Because of this I have been able to step back from myself as photographer and let someone else take full creative control over their image and aim avoid stylistic impositions as much as possible. This is the idea of collaborative photography. Traditional documentary photographers would capture things through their worldview and pass it off as impartial because it was a photo, even though a photo is inherently subjective. When we accept this subjectivity and share it with the subject, then the subject gets to make their own statement rather than having someone else’s statement imposed upon them. This is how I can, in good conscience, have taken and exhibited these photos. Because this was a project built around learning and sharing experience. I shared my knowledge of the minutiae of photographic representations (alongside photography basics and funding so that if these guys want to go on and take more creative portraits, they can) and in return I’ve had the opportunity to learn about their relationships with identity and performances. By this interaction, together we have been able to build three really cool portraiture series. I think for me, this project shows that we can build bridges between communities safely and ethically if we all just listen a little bit closer.
I need to give one last round of thanks to the collaborators for trusting me with these photos. Without them there wouldn’t be anything to share here, and I’m so thankful we had the opportunity to learn from each other.
