STATEMENTS

MAYBE TOMORROW – PROJECT STATEMENT

Maybe Tomorrow is a long term, lyrical documentary project centered around my partner’s hometown in rural western Kentucky that explores the complexity of the meanings assigned to, or assumed of, the region by both its residents and outsiders. Curious about my partner Erik’s continued ambivalence about returning to his home after building a life here in New York, I began to photograph this community, which we return to every summer.

As a queer man from the Northeast, I was viewed as an outsider, sometimes with suspicion, sometimes with plain curiosity. In our uneasy shared gaze, we had not seen the likes of each other before. I discovered that inviting people to sit for a portrait became a point of connection and a point of entry to an unfamiliar world beyond my own that sometimes felt unsafe. Building on the portraits, I began to make landscapes and still lifes to document where and how these individuals lived. The more I got to know this community–one that is still largely segregated–I had to grapple with, and resolve, my own personal prejudices about who these people were and what this region represented. My images and ideas about this place have grown beyond the initial ones of ruin and poverty, which punctuate the land. The longer I immersed myself in this world, the more I was able to see the complex relationships between the rough edges of rural life and the beauty of the landscape from which that life sprung, and the culture that seeks to preserve it.

This complexity manifested in my range of image subjects as I worked my way below the surface of notions of regional politics, history, and religion–a complicated convergence which celebrates, defines, and oftentimes traps a region and its people in unyielding identities, or forces those who don’t fit in to leave. But not without some sorrow. Maybe Tomorrow is ultimately an open-ended narrative about the ways in which place inevitably drives who we become and the ways in which we seek to understand the homes we can’t quite leave behind.

HIDDEN GLANCES – PROJECT STATEMENT

Hidden Glances is a series of photographs constructed from vintage gay pornographic calendars published between the years when I was beginning to recognize my sexuality as a youth until I came out.

Each image is an amalgam of two figures that originally appeared in the same calendar. In the top layer the male body has been spliced from his scene and the figureless image is laid on top of a second image. Through the negative space of the absent figure, a censured portion of the figure beneath is revealed. The construction is then photographed, thus bringing both layers onto the same seamless photographic plane. 

This compression of space, along with the duality of revealing and concealing, become a metaphor for the numerous years when my gaze upon other men was tentative and fleeting, fearful that those stolen glimpses would expose my homosexuality.

Furthermore, the photographs remove the source material from their original intention—that of gratuitous imagery for sexual stimulation. A new narrative is constructed in which the viewer is invited to consider how pornography can be used to inform more reflective conversations about the male body, the coming-out process, and the struggles that so many gay men and I have encountered. On a more universal level, the work explores themes of self-acceptance, shame, fear, and personal secrets.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a lens-based artist who works primarily on long-term projects focused on identity, gender, and memory. Understanding that image-making is inextricably linked to perception, I combine my background in documentary photography with my interest in subjectivity in order to connect personal perception and universal experience. For my series Hidden Glances, I repurpose gay pornographic calendars to trace my own period of life in the closet to create a new understanding of my history. In my ongoing lyrical documentary project Maybe Tomorrow, I photograph the hometown community of my partner in Greenville, KY. This open narrative explores how place instills and informs identity, mining the tensions of belonging or not belonging, with the continual and unspoken threat of exile for violating communal norms. My work explores the ways in which identities (and histories) are shaped, maintained, reinforced, and challenged.