Open – free theme, 2nd Prize
Solitary Fruit 10 of a series of 20 (mostly) black & white analog photographs made in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama: the Deep South. At the end of 2011 I followed the 1959 route of the (white) American writer John Howard Griffin, who in his book Black Like Me reports of his travels as a black man (with help of medicine, UV light and make-up) through the Deep South. From the prologue of Black Like Me (1960): “It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and detested. I could have been a member of any “inferior” group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same.” In this sentence I saw a clear invitation to other persons of “inferior groups” to follow his example. I projected his subversive idea on the Gender theme and traveled not as a woman, but as a man. Despite the risks involved on this road trip, I found it of great importance to show transgender as an identity outside of it’s own subculture. I traveled alone, and was the photographer and the model, I had to keep an eye on the camera while shooting. This way of working was necessary to create the right level of concentration and to emphasize the solitary nature of this project being, as Butler calls it, an incoherent or discontinuous gendered person; an individual with a secret.
Risk Hazekamp
