Abstract
Author(s): Lehner, Ace | Abstract: As an identity and an analytic, trans offers a compelling challenge to photographic discourse. Trans, as a rejection of the assigned sex at birth, is a rejection of what was assigned to us based on our physical attributes, an assumption made about us based on our surface aesthetics. Trans rejects the physical surface in favor of living our lives based on an internal feeling: something that is not visible but manifested visually in a way that plays with the aesthetics and expectations of gender. As trans scholar and artist micha cardenas has observed, trans is often about a rejection of the visible. To picture trans subjects, then, is to make a surface rendering of something (the person’s outward appearance) that is already de-essentialized from any necessary essence or “truth.” Trans as an analytic offers a method to view the photographic image not only as distinct and distant from the referent but in tension with it. Trans as a method prompts a rethinking of surfaces in relation to essence, identity, authenticity, and fixity, unfixing the surface from the subject.
Highlights
As an identity and an analytic, trans offers a compelling challenge to photographic discourse
There are no as of yet trans methods of thinking photography, but there are pictures and methods about photography in postcolonial locations, locations that are invested in reworking portrait photographs and decolonizing photography and discourses of photography
One thing that may not be readily recognizable but is critical to understanding photographic practices and discourse is that trans photography, while not necessarily practiced in locations that at first glance appear to be in postcolonial locations geographically, may often be in postcolonial locations ideologically
Summary
As an identity and an analytic, trans offers a compelling challenge to photographic discourse. Feminism brought a demand that art address the historicity and culturally specific functions of images.[18] Feminists articulated the problem of the tendency to theorize in ways that centered and privileged masculinity.[19] Shifts in discourse at large were brought forward due to feminist critique and scholarship forwarding methods that reworked perspectives of representations, the gaze, oppositional readings, and attention to intersectionality among others.[20] Postmodern photographers began to question the veracity of images, as is observable in projects such as Evidence by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel.[21] Feminist postmodern artists like Cindy Sherman and Adrian Piper engaged in practices that called attention both to the constructedness of pictures and to the ways in which they are intertwined with ideologies about people and the constitution of identities. Susan Bright has observed that contemporary photographic portraiture is ambiguous yet still believes in its ability to convey some sort of “inner workings” of the subject.[24]
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