Closet Cards, 2020
Closet Cards, 2020, series of gel silver print cards, 10 x 15 cm each
This series of photographs reinterprets the tradition of carte de visite, which was one of the early versions of vernacular photography where sitters performed social status through clothing and props. I am attracted to the flat depth of field and fallacy of self-presentation that carte de visite often exhibited. Treating this method of portraiture as a form of drag or camp allows me to acknowledge an absurdist construction of identity which is heavily reliant on material possessions and how this does or doesn’t allow access to social recognition, specifically in the context of queer and transgender subjects.
Using clothes and fabrics within my closet and creating provisional “characters” contained within this space, I metaphorically reference a process of withholding which is associated with queerness. In each frame, the semblance of a “character” or identity is reliant on material contextual clues. This occurs through the treatment of the subject as a cadaver of identity projection. In fact, there is no human subject in these images, rendering these purely topical. The visual emphasis of folding, piecing together and dragging or dropping calls forth a critique and manipulation of this topicality.
This series of photographs reinterprets the tradition of carte de visite, which was one of the early versions of vernacular photography where sitters performed social status through clothing and props. I am attracted to the flat depth of field and fallacy of self-presentation that carte de visite often exhibited. Treating this method of portraiture as a form of drag or camp allows me to acknowledge an absurdist construction of identity which is heavily reliant on material possessions and how this does or doesn’t allow access to social recognition, specifically in the context of queer and transgender subjects.
Using clothes and fabrics within my closet and creating provisional “characters” contained within this space, I metaphorically reference a process of withholding which is associated with queerness. In each frame, the semblance of a “character” or identity is reliant on material contextual clues. This occurs through the treatment of the subject as a cadaver of identity projection. In fact, there is no human subject in these images, rendering these purely topical. The visual emphasis of folding, piecing together and dragging or dropping calls forth a critique and manipulation of this topicality.