Trans_Lucent

These images are a tiny slice of a never to be finished diary called “TransLucent.” TransLucent is a response to the simultaneous convergence of the many transitions happening in my world and the wider world around me at the time I bagan. The particular genesis of the work was our child telling us that he is Transgender. He came out during the holidays of 2016, and I found my photography became my response. Translucent started as a way to deal with one person’s emotional response to his child transitioning. It has become much more.

Near the start of this part of this work, The Rubin Museum had a brilliant exhibition called “The World is Sound” which included a space where you could lie down and hear a monk reading “The Tibetan Book of The Dead.” At the same time, I read “Lincoln in The Bardo.” and reread the first two volumes of Andra Watkins “Nowhere Series:”” Hard To Die” and; “To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis .” Soon after I heard Laurie Anderson’s “Heart of a Dog” for the first time and saw a portion of her work “Lolabelle in The Bardo.” at MASS MoCA.

“The Tibetan term bardo, or “intermediate state,” is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives. In American culture, we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are what is being referred to by the term bardo. But to be precise, bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us.”  

PEMA KHANDRO RINPOCHE

This project is not simply - or really at all - about my response or one family’s response to transitioning. It concerns the moment between, the moment after the input and before the formulated conscious response, the internal monologues that never stop, the external appearances we show to the world as a response to the transitions in our lives.

Much of the work involves double exposures, portraits and self-portraits. The work itself is in transition and evolving as it is made. Some of the images were planned and some spontaneous. The tools used are anything that can capture and pixilate an image so that it can exist in our digital world.

There is one thing that Katherine and I have found to be true as we have all transitioned from our child’s given name to his chosen one: Asher. This person is our child. They have been freaking us out and flipping our world upside down from the moment they were born. The name, the hair, the pronouns, the gender may change, but they remain our child. And we love them, forever.