WEBVTT 00:00:10.240 --> 00:00:10.800 [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] 00:00:21.740 --> 00:00:23.960 [Elle Pérez, Artist] 00:00:23.960 --> 00:00:26.680 I love that space where something is a photograph 00:00:26.680 --> 00:00:28.160 and not necessarily a word. 00:00:28.160 --> 00:00:32.580 Or, you haven't put the words together for what you're looking at yet. 00:00:33.960 --> 00:00:39.500 Something can live there in photography and not have to be definitive. 00:00:42.160 --> 00:00:47.120 [Elle Pérez Works Between the Frame] 00:00:54.640 --> 00:01:00.000 My cousin Alex is an entertainment wrestler in the Bronx. 00:01:00.010 --> 00:01:02.920 I sent him a message, "Can I come and photograph your show?" 00:01:02.920 --> 00:01:05.700 And he was like, "Yeah, just don't tell our family." 00:01:10.520 --> 00:01:13.220 When I was photographing the wrestlers, 00:01:13.230 --> 00:01:17.550 what I was interested in was the choreography of the wrestling match, 00:01:17.550 --> 00:01:20.620 because the thing about entertainment wrestling is that everything is scripted 00:01:20.620 --> 00:01:22.260 and everything is choreographed. 00:01:23.240 --> 00:01:25.060 And there are ways that you would move your body 00:01:25.060 --> 00:01:28.000 to look more authentically like you were in pain. 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:30.780 If you were hanging like Joe is hanging on the ropes, 00:01:30.780 --> 00:01:33.920 this extended moment becomes more sculptural. 00:01:33.920 --> 00:01:34.640 [LAUGHS] 00:01:39.020 --> 00:01:41.440 I don't think there's a way to 00:01:41.440 --> 00:01:44.820 involve a camera without immediately involving a kind of fiction. 00:01:45.280 --> 00:01:48.300 All of this is about an aspiration toward acting. 00:01:53.300 --> 00:01:55.220 [SUBWAY NOISES] 00:02:04.800 --> 00:02:07.280 In a way, my work has always been made collaboratively. 00:02:07.280 --> 00:02:11.580 Because of that, that's why I don't think of it as documentary. 00:02:11.590 --> 00:02:16.620 Because my work had such a raw, visceral relationship to emotional authenticity, 00:02:16.620 --> 00:02:19.370 people often would recommend that I would go into documentary. 00:02:19.370 --> 00:02:21.780 But I could never figure out the ethics of it. 00:02:23.640 --> 00:02:27.200 I was yelled at by the editor of National Geographic 00:02:27.200 --> 00:02:29.750 for my photos looking misleading, 00:02:29.750 --> 00:02:31.670 because they looked like documentary images, 00:02:31.670 --> 00:02:34.500 but they actually were made by staging them. 00:02:35.680 --> 00:02:37.000 It looks effortless. 00:02:37.300 --> 00:02:39.360 They're still pretty set up. 00:02:49.580 --> 00:02:50.380 [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] 00:02:59.260 --> 00:03:01.830 Definitely the geography of where a lot of the pictures are made-- 00:03:01.830 --> 00:03:03.819 whether it's in the Bronx or Puerto Rico-- 00:03:03.819 --> 00:03:07.100 it's really important, and I don't think about it too much at all. 00:03:07.100 --> 00:03:09.960 I think about them as being more related to people. 00:03:11.240 --> 00:03:14.680 They're all made from really strong relationships. 00:03:15.700 --> 00:03:21.540 But how do you show something that relates to a particular experience 00:03:21.540 --> 00:03:25.060 without showing the spectacle of it? 00:03:27.260 --> 00:03:28.580 The photograph of the hand, 00:03:28.580 --> 00:03:31.000 it has such a visceral, physical feeling 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:33.830 of what two bodies could be capable of. 00:03:33.830 --> 00:03:39.640 You can use photography to depict things that you actually cannot picture. 00:03:48.720 --> 00:03:51.460 It has so much to do with identity, and it has so much to do with 00:03:51.460 --> 00:03:58.420 how surfaces have the ability to contain the traces of an experience. 00:04:16.620 --> 00:04:20.920 A binder is a chest compression garment that, 00:04:20.920 --> 00:04:25.980 initially, it was designed for men who had excess breast tissue. 00:04:25.980 --> 00:04:31.580 Then it got co-opted by the transmasculine community. 00:04:32.060 --> 00:04:34.900 The photograph that I made of my binder 00:04:34.910 --> 00:04:39.960 was only possible after that object had been worn for, like, five years. 00:04:39.960 --> 00:04:42.060 It had become frayed. 00:04:42.060 --> 00:04:44.220 The sweat and pain of that garment, 00:04:44.220 --> 00:04:46.690 all of it is visible in the fabric itself-- 00:04:46.690 --> 00:04:52.180 and then in how it's photographed with an extreme focus on precise details. 00:04:53.990 --> 00:04:57.440 The pictures focus on something like a seam, 00:04:57.450 --> 00:04:59.320 or on someone's tattoos, 00:04:59.320 --> 00:05:00.420 or on someone's face. 00:05:00.420 --> 00:05:02.440 Then when you see it at a scale, 00:05:02.440 --> 00:05:05.060 you're able to have a certain proximity to detail 00:05:05.060 --> 00:05:08.920 that you can't have in just your day-to-day relationship. 00:05:14.530 --> 00:05:18.700 These giant wall collages that I would use to draw from-- 00:05:18.710 --> 00:05:20.730 whether it was drawing for writing, 00:05:20.730 --> 00:05:23.990 or drawing from text, or text fragments-- 00:05:23.990 --> 00:05:28.590 just looking at things and having them be reflected back at me 00:05:28.590 --> 00:05:30.960 so that I can think about them. 00:05:30.960 --> 00:05:34.800 Then things slowly make their way into the work. 00:05:44.160 --> 00:05:48.480 Form being related to queerness because it's undefinable and unboundaried, 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. 00:05:53.500 --> 00:05:57.340 Something like a photograph is then like a perfect container, 00:05:57.340 --> 00:06:01.240 because it is not actually ever definitive.