Beauty and Truth - 2021
In this series, I investigated the ephemeral and transformative nature of movements associated with drag queens and professional wrestlers. I shot this series on black and white film, then processed and printed the images in a darkroom. Visually, I was inspired by the rich history of both drag and professional wrestling in the city of Memphis and looked to historic documentations of both scenes to create the aesthetic of black and white journalistic photography. In addition to documentary style shooting, I used a technique consisting of dragged shutter speeds to blur movement and hard rear curtain flash to freeze it at the last second of exposure. The work approaches the idea of performance and movement as transformative, and speaks to the camera as a tool for seeing what cannot be seen otherwise.
You can see my commercial wrestling photography here.
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