Is it possible to believe that the presence of the camera in my hand did not compromise the honesty of this intimate moment, even as I am a subject in this photograph?
Throughout my early twenties, I took my camera everywhere. I don’t mean that I always had one in a bag, or in the same room - I mean that for years there was almost always a camera in my hand, over my shoulder, or within arm’s reach. It’s easy to remember this fact, but not how it felt, especially as I look back on the results of it now and find them shocking. I photographed every aspect of my and my friend’s lives - every silly mundane detail, every private intimacy. If I saw it, I shot it. I can’t believe that people allowed me to do this; it was somehow accepted, even by people I had only just met.
This strange intertwining of the camera into the roots and branches of my personal life is most starkly seen in the photographs I took with Rik, my partner between the ages of 22 and 24. Our love was formative: vast but volatile, deep but destructive. Even after all these years, he is the most influential person outside of my immediate family that I’ve ever known, and I’m grateful for all that he taught me, at great cost to himself.
I struggle to understand the role of the camera in this dynamic: it documented our most intimate moments, and yet its presence was so natural, so much a part of me and what I did that it was not “a thing.” The camera was not played to, nor was the camera downplayed. I suspect this was unique to its time, both in my life and also in the history of the role cameras have played in all our lives, just before the advent of the smartphone made photography ubiquitous.
I recently unearthed this image as it will be exhibited later this month at New York’s High Line Nine Gallery alongside works by Steven Klein, Marina Abramovic, Sir Isaac Julien, David LaChapelle, Yael Malka, Nevot Miller, as part of this year’s Pride Celebrations by Equinox: “Between You & Me: The Disappearance of the Binary.”
Glasgow, 2009/2024.
#people #portrait #intimate #love #lovers #lgbtqia #lgbt #pride #glasgow #scotland #scottish #equinox #equinoxpride #cinematic #expression 
