Portfolio > Queer Images: Portraits

Title: Queer Images: Portraits
Printing Process: Archival inkjet photographs
Number of pages/images: 34 pages
Book Structure: Coptic Bound
Paper Stock: Epson Enhanced Matte
Dimensions: 7.5 x 7.5
Edition Size: 8
Publication Date: 2017

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identified people are experiencing unprecedented visibility in the media and popular culture. These representations often tend to be flattened images that reduce complex individuals to simplified and limiting categories of identity that exist in contradiction to lived realties of gender and sexual minorities. Queer Images: Portraits aims to expand the boundaries of LGBTQ communities by creating theoretically informed photographic images in domestic spaces that juxtapose interpretations of queer identity with lived realities. 
These images are created in a series developed over a period of months working closely with the sitter to create portraits that both explore the photographer’s relationship with the sitter and the implications of that person’s reality. Working broadly with Nayland Blake’s assertion from curating “In a Different Light” that “to be queer is to cobble together identity, to fashion provisional tactics at will, to pollute and deflate all discourses” and Judith Butler’s notions of performance, intelligibility, and justice I create photographs of LGBTQ identified people in domestic settings to visualize and create more nuanced understandings of the possibility for queer lives. Photographing the domestic spaces of the sitter transgresses the fragile private-public aspects of being queer that are freely expressed in a domestic space. 
The photographs leverage the burgeoning and uniquely diverse LGBTQ community of Orlando and South Florida.

I would like to thank FAU First Wave Grant, FAU SURF Grant, and Friedland Grant for providing funding that supports the production of this documentary photography project.

Char Pratt