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