I began photographing How Do You Want to Be Seen? at the start of the pandemic. At first, I used gay dating apps to connect with potential collaborators. As the Coronavirus pandemic has become endemic – and now Mpox and Polio and Ebola, too – I’ve expanded recruitment to social media (Instagram and Facebook), word of mouth, and sometimes I invite participants just by asking them. I relinquish my authorial privilege in order to give people in positions of marginality the power to control their own depiction.
Archival Inkjet Print, 24” x 30,” edition of 5 + 2 AP, 2022
“In the history of Western portraiture, subjects that look like me feel few and far between. If we do appear, we are either opiated monsters or orientalized pearls adorning the neck of empire. What does it mean to turn my curved back on that gaze, to defiantly return that gaze? Can a disabled body of color – with its queer and curved contours – have an erotics on its own terms?” – Travis (he | him)