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Mixed-up (but not mixed up)

I deffo agree with the theory that narrowing down an area of interest paradoxically opens up what seems a vastness of possibilities.  This seems to be so with the subject of transgender, for me.

This weekend one of the ideas was 're-creating people' but trying to do so by taking 'empty room frames' and then combining them with a self-portrait shot taken immediately afterwards, and unlike an in-camera double-exposure being able to control the mix in the edit, fading myself out.

This covers one familiar trans area, the one of anonymity (the tactic of turning my back to the camera when I walk into the shot), but touches, too, on how to suggest memory, which after all is what a photograph is, and, ramping that aspect up a bit, addressing mortality.   Photos (and sound recordings and videos), particularly of people we know personally who have died, have an uncanny quality about them, an unreality even if all the facts (appearances, sound of a voice) are correct.  They are ghost and memory made hard reality.

Presenting oneself as another gender, particularly if it's problematic, is affirmed through the act of taking photographs, it is an affirmation, if only to oneself.  This personal evidence is also an acknowedgement that a life is just one fleeting shutter exposure of overwhelmingly bright light caught between the darkness of eternity immediately before and after.  A tiny reminder to live.

The self-portraits, facing away, hiding directly in front of the lens as usual, are this time also on the verge of unravelling for another reason; these pictures are me looking at myself pretending to be something I'm not (female), also someone specifically that I'm not (a memory from over 40 years ago) - pretending to be in a gallery in another city looking at pictures on a wall that aren't there.  

Obviously : )