1 00:00:10,240 --> 00:00:10,800 [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] 2 00:00:21,740 --> 00:00:23,960 [Elle Pérez, Artist] 3 00:00:23,960 --> 00:00:26,680 I love that space where something is a photograph 4 00:00:26,680 --> 00:00:28,160 and not necessarily a word. 5 00:00:28,160 --> 00:00:32,580 Or, you haven't put the words together for what you're looking at yet. 6 00:00:33,960 --> 00:00:39,500 Something can live there in photography and not have to be definitive. 7 00:00:42,160 --> 00:00:47,120 [Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame] 8 00:00:54,640 --> 00:01:00,000 My cousin Alex is an entertainment wrestler in the Bronx. 9 00:01:00,010 --> 00:01:02,920 I sent him a message, "Can I come and photograph your show?" 10 00:01:02,920 --> 00:01:05,700 And he was like, "Yeah, just don't tell our family." 11 00:01:10,520 --> 00:01:13,220 When I was photographing the wrestlers, 12 00:01:13,230 --> 00:01:17,550 what I was interested in was the choreography of the wrestling match, 13 00:01:17,550 --> 00:01:20,620 because the thing about entertainment wrestling is that everything is scripted 14 00:01:20,620 --> 00:01:22,260 and everything is choreographed. 15 00:01:23,240 --> 00:01:25,060 And there are ways that you would move your body 16 00:01:25,060 --> 00:01:28,000 to look more authentically like you were in pain. 17 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:30,780 If you were hanging like Joe is hanging on the ropes, 18 00:01:30,780 --> 00:01:33,920 this extended moment becomes more sculptural. 19 00:01:33,920 --> 00:01:34,640 [LAUGHS] 20 00:01:39,020 --> 00:01:41,440 I don't think there's a way to 21 00:01:41,440 --> 00:01:44,820 involve a camera without immediately involving a kind of fiction. 22 00:01:45,280 --> 00:01:48,300 All of this is about an aspiration toward acting. 23 00:01:53,300 --> 00:01:55,220 [SUBWAY NOISES] 24 00:02:04,800 --> 00:02:07,280 In a way, my work has always been made collaboratively. 25 00:02:07,280 --> 00:02:11,580 Because of that, that's why I don't think of it as documentary. 26 00:02:11,590 --> 00:02:16,620 Because my work had such a raw, visceral relationship to emotional authenticity, 27 00:02:16,620 --> 00:02:19,370 people often would recommend that I would go into documentary. 28 00:02:19,370 --> 00:02:21,780 But I could never figure out the ethics of it. 29 00:02:23,640 --> 00:02:27,200 I was yelled at by the editor of National Geographic 30 00:02:27,200 --> 00:02:29,750 for my photos looking misleading, 31 00:02:29,750 --> 00:02:31,670 because they looked like documentary images, 32 00:02:31,670 --> 00:02:34,500 but they actually were made by staging them. 33 00:02:35,680 --> 00:02:37,000 It looks effortless. 34 00:02:37,300 --> 00:02:39,360 They're still pretty set up. 35 00:02:49,580 --> 00:02:50,380 [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] 36 00:02:59,260 --> 00:03:01,830 Definitely the geography of where a lot of the pictures are made-- 37 00:03:01,830 --> 00:03:03,819 whether it's in the Bronx or Puerto Rico-- 38 00:03:03,819 --> 00:03:07,100 it's really important, and I don't think about it too much at all. 39 00:03:07,100 --> 00:03:09,960 I think about them as being more related to people. 40 00:03:11,240 --> 00:03:14,680 They're all made from really strong relationships. 41 00:03:15,700 --> 00:03:21,540 But how do you show something that relates to a particular experience 42 00:03:21,540 --> 00:03:25,060 without showing the spectacle of it? 43 00:03:27,260 --> 00:03:28,580 The photograph of the hand, 44 00:03:28,580 --> 00:03:31,000 it has such a visceral, physical feeling 45 00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:33,830 of what two bodies could be capable of. 46 00:03:33,830 --> 00:03:39,640 You can use photography to depict things that you actually cannot picture. 47 00:03:48,720 --> 00:03:51,460 It has so much to do with identity, and it has so much to do with 48 00:03:51,460 --> 00:03:58,420 how surfaces have the ability to contain the traces of an experience. 49 00:04:16,620 --> 00:04:20,920 A binder is a chest compression garment that, 50 00:04:20,920 --> 00:04:25,980 initially, it was designed for men who had excess breast tissue. 51 00:04:25,980 --> 00:04:31,580 Then it got co-opted by the transmasculine community. 52 00:04:32,060 --> 00:04:34,900 The photograph that I made of my binder 53 00:04:34,910 --> 00:04:39,960 was only possible after that object had been worn for, like, five years. 54 00:04:39,960 --> 00:04:42,060 It had become frayed. 55 00:04:42,060 --> 00:04:44,220 The sweat and pain of that garment, 56 00:04:44,220 --> 00:04:46,690 all of it is visible in the fabric itself-- 57 00:04:46,690 --> 00:04:52,180 and then in how it's photographed with an extreme focus on precise details. 58 00:04:53,990 --> 00:04:57,440 The pictures focus on something like a seam, 59 00:04:57,450 --> 00:04:59,320 or on someone's tattoos, 60 00:04:59,320 --> 00:05:00,420 or on someone's face. 61 00:05:00,420 --> 00:05:02,440 Then when you see it at a scale, 62 00:05:02,440 --> 00:05:05,060 you're able to have a certain proximity to detail 63 00:05:05,060 --> 00:05:08,920 that you can't have in just your day-to-day relationship. 64 00:05:14,530 --> 00:05:18,700 These giant wall collages that I would use to draw from-- 65 00:05:18,710 --> 00:05:20,730 whether it was drawing for writing, 66 00:05:20,730 --> 00:05:23,990 or drawing from text, or text fragments-- 67 00:05:23,990 --> 00:05:28,590 just looking at things and having them be reflected back at me 68 00:05:28,590 --> 00:05:30,960 so that I can think about them. 69 00:05:30,960 --> 00:05:34,800 Then things slowly make their way into the work. 70 00:05:44,160 --> 00:05:48,480 Form being related to queerness because it's undefinable and unboundaried, 71 00:05:48,480 --> 00:05:53,500 it has to have such a space of possibility within it to even be possible at all. 72 00:05:53,500 --> 00:05:57,340 Something like a photograph is then like a perfect container, 73 00:05:57,340 --> 00:06:01,240 because it is not actually ever definitive.