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Seraph's Page
Seraph, my first collaborator on the Genderwork series, offered these remarkably insightful thoughts on modeling, on transgender and on the essence of photographic portriature.
Working with Jack to create the series of photos was an incredible experience. I had worked with painters before shooting with Jack, as well as shot photos for a few adult alternative sites, but I had only touched the surface of the art form of modeling. I do see modeling as a form of art--a form of still-life acting. A model brings not only themselves to the photograph or painting, but also their "other selves"-- the subconscious states of being that make up the multiplicity of the self. The selves that I brought to my collaboration with Jack were me, but were not wholly mine; as it is in acting, that was part of the joy of portraying them.
There is a certain gravity to Jack's work, and also to his person, that creates the mood which suffuses his photographs. Within that mood, we shot a great many photos that people connected with. We also shot photos that are deeply personal to me. I zipped myself into my too-small, eighth-grade prom dress and re-inhabited that strange, adolescent female world that had touched me so briefly and had been so anxiously painful. The photo, for me, touches a place of sadness that is deeply personal. Other photos-- wearing a dress, gripping a handful of syringes used for injecting testosterone hormones-- were made as if to confront their audience directly. Still others blend the personal with the confrontational: they are a statement of "how it is"-- and if that happens to offend, so be it.
My work with Jack doesn't communicate what it is like to be a transgender youth, because that experience is always a personal one. However, I believe there is value in the work for other transgender people, and for people in general. I want the work that I did, and that Jack continues to do with other transgender youth, to be accessible to as many people as possible, because it is not easy to use spoken or written language to communicate about what it means to be transgender.
There is another way to communicate, though, which does not require language. Just as this culture has the myth of man and woman--Adam and Eve--buried deep in its collective unconscious, so is the myth of the androgyne and the shape shifter buried even deeper, within the memories of our pagan past. While we may not live tribally, weaving stories to support and explain our sacred transgendered people, we do have access to art. Photography can tell the story of transgenderism in its native language, that of mythology. Unlike other artistic representations, portrait photography is "real"-- a human being is shown to us on paper, undeniable as bone. When that human being is mythological-- impossible--transgendered, something significant has been accomplished by putting them to paper: we have joined the impossible and the real. Photography of forgotten and hidden realities make the impossible real, and at the tidewaters where real meets dream we invite the audience in.
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