[CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS]
[Elle Pérez, Artist]
I love that space where something is a photograph
and not necessarily a word.
Or, you haven't put the words together for what you're looking at yet.
Something can live there in photography and not have to be definitive.
[Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame]
My cousin Alex is an entertainment wrestler in the Bronx.
I sent him a message, "Can I come and photograph your show?"
And he was like, "Yeah, just don't tell our family."
When I was photographing the wrestlers,
what I was interested in was the choreography of the wrestling match,
because the thing about entertainment wrestling is that everything is scripted
and everything is choreographed.
And there are ways that you would move your body
to look more authentically like you were in pain.
If you were hanging like Joe is hanging on the ropes,
this extended moment becomes more sculptural.
[LAUGHS]
I don't think there's a way to
involve a camera without immediately involving a kind of fiction.
All of this is about an aspiration toward acting.
[SUBWAY NOISES]
In a way, my work has always been made collaboratively.
Because of that, that's why I don't think of it as documentary.
Because my work had such a raw, visceral relationship to emotional authenticity,
people often would recommend that I would go into documentary.
But I could never figure out the ethics of it.
I was yelled at by the editor of National Geographic
for my photos looking misleading,
because they looked like documentary images,
but they actually were made by staging them.
It looks effortless.
They're still pretty set up.
[CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS]
Definitely the geography of where a lot of the pictures are made--
whether it's in the Bronx or Puerto Rico--
it's really important, and I don't think about it too much at all.
I think about them as being more related to people.
They're all made from really strong relationships.
But how do you show something that relates to a particular experience
without showing the spectacle of it?
The photograph of the hand,
it has such a visceral, physical feeling
of what two bodies could be capable of.
You can use photography to depict things that you actually cannot picture.
It has so much to do with identity, and it has so much to do with
how surfaces have the ability to contain the traces of an experience.
A binder is a chest compression garment that,
initially, it was designed for men who had excess breast tissue.
Then it got co-opted by the transmasculine community.
The photograph that I made of my binder
was only possible after that object had been worn for, like, five years.
It had become frayed.
The sweat and pain of that garment,
all of it is visible in the fabric itself--
and then in how it's photographed with an extreme focus on precise details.
The pictures focus on something like a seam,
or on someone's tattoos,
or on someone's face.
Then when you see it at a scale,
you're able to have a certain proximity to detail
that you can't have in just your day-to-day relationship.
These giant wall collages that I would use to draw from--
whether it was drawing for writing,
or drawing from text, or text fragments--
just looking at things and having them be reflected back at me
so that I can think about them.
Then things slowly make their way into the work.
Form being related to queerness because it's undefinable and unboundaried,
it has to have such a space of possibility within it to even be possible at all.
Something like a photograph is then like a perfect container,
because it is not actually ever definitive.