Untitled, 2008, liquid light emulsion print from a pinhole camera negative
More 2008 art!
I decided to take a self-portrait. With my vagina. That being said, I didn’t work in class much, I just disappeared for long periods of time and would arrive back to the classroom 3 hours later and walking funny. Troubleshooting for this took me about a week or two anyway, just to figure out how to execute the damn idea. Even when I figured out the mechanics of a vagina pinhole camera, taking pictures with your crotch is not very easy. It’s not like there was a viewfinder or anything. There was a lot of me crammed in a tiny room at 4AM (to make sure nobody would bother me or accidentally come in) with a photolamp, timer, and my crotch pointed at a mirror in hopes that I had gotten my face in the reflection that time.
This image was the last image I got, and it was the last piece of film I had. Lucky. I printed the image over and over methodically onto linen paper with liquid light emulsion, which distorted the image in various ways so each one was different. I sewed them together into a book. On the back of each page I hand copied passages from my personal journal in which a person’s reaction to me/ perception of me was directly effected by what they assumed was in my pants.
At the time I was mostly passing as male and known as male. I made the decision to out myself to the class as some people knew and some didn’t, but I was thinking a lot about the idea of ‘stealth’ and that I wasn’t sure if it felt right for me. Transition was also a part of my life that I was SERIOUSLY struggling with and learning about and I wasn’t ready to just… not talk about it or hide it. The other more negative part of my decision was that I was incredibly depressed at that point in time and didn’t really care about the consequences of anything I did. So during in progress critique when everyone had to talk about what they were doing, I just blurted it out. It was good times. Sort of.
The roots of doing this were based in two places. 1) Force people to confront the fact that the person in the portrait was photographed using their own vagina. Which meant that some of them had assumed wrongly- the person in the portrait was of masculine appearance so, weren’t they supposed to have a penis? And then on the backs of the photographs, I wanted them to read what strife this assumption had caused me. Or about how people would instantly switch pronouns from ‘he’ to ‘she’ after learning that one small fact- my genitalia. Or the awful feeling of being rejected by people of all sorts of sexual orientation. And sometimes being seen as only a fetish object because of that one piece of anatomy. I wanted people to know that I was really fucking tormented about this and I couldn’t even bring it up 99% of the time, even if I really needed to talk about it, without being seen as a joke or a freak because it’s not a ‘normal’ issue. I wanted people to look at my face, different and distorted on each page because of all the shit people project onto me and label me as and decide for me when they find out about this part of my body- a part of my body that hardly anybody even sees or should matter to them. But at that moment they did see it because I was making it so apparent that they couldn’t ignore it, and I hoped that they were uncomfortable. Because I certainly was. And maybe by seeing these words coupled with these pictures so intimately, they could feel what I have felt, and consider this more.
2) To force myself to confront myself, and my own body. And the possibility that I was changing it because those passages written on the backs of the photographs were just too much for me.
The above picture is just a positive scan of a negative. I never scanned or photographed the book I made, but maybe I should sometime.
