portfolio > it's a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found

"It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found."

It’s a cliché that men, butches, and trans guys love their trucks. That cliché also holds a bit of truth because I am definitely one of those transguys. Georgia became a place that represented oppression and the desperate need to go. As a teen and on into my 20s, driving was escape and my truck was the place I felt most myself and at home. When I began taking photographs, it was really on my trip away from Georgia and to my life in Tucson where taking pictures took on new meaning. Taking trips always involved taking photos and sometimes were really what the trips were for. I wanted to go wherever my truck could take me and capture that feeling of new found possibility. The photos in this series are from those trips and include images and text that weave through the work and look at notions of memory, wholeness, travel, and masculinity.

Vik Muniz says that when a photo is taken the shutter closes and so the exact moment of the photograph isn’t seen by the photographer. All the pictures that have ever been taken in the history of photography have never been seen by the human eye. Thus the history of photography is a history of blindness. It is a history of relinquished experience for the sake of the object. That may be true, but my photographic history is about gaining the ability to see and having the right to my own experiences. To look beyond the place where I grew up and the female body I was born into. To see motion, freedom, and acceptance and to make my own mark on those captured moments.


hidden and found: memory pools
hidden and found: memory pools
chromographic print with pencil
14"x20" mounted
2011