Queer Speculations

What secrets do old photographs hold? What lives were the people on the other side living, did they show up for this photo looking different than they did on Tuesday? What were they not saying to the person standing next to them?

In 2023, while working on a photo prompt from Kinship Photography Collective to explore the Bartrum trail in northern Georgia, I encountered an old photograph in the woods. It was a photo of four rows of men looking directly at the camera. The Civilian Conservation Corps, stationed there in the 1930s and 40s and put to work to create the trail I had been exploring.

How many of these men found liberation in these male only work groups and developed relationships with each other? I took many photographs of this photograph zooming in on specific coded gestures; a sly smile, a too close hand next to hand. I am surely inserting my own queer longing for more historical representation, but considering that statistically we are at least 10% of the population, a group of 100 men would certainly have a handful of queers.

On the trail I also made cyanotypes as an attempt to absorb some of the patterns created from the interaction of sun and leaves.

Back in my studio I was thinking about the ways culture and nature are intertwined (if there is a distinction at all) and how we are connected to all things past and present. During these speculations I began to rip the photographs and cyanotypes into circles - mimicking the circular orbs I spotted on the forest floor and making visible the circular experience of time.

I slowly pieced the circles back together on a large canvas. I continue to work with these photographs, layering wax and glitter, thinking through ways to be in dialog with these non-genetic ancestors.