Charles Pratt

Queer Images Charles Pratt

Although LBGTQ people currently experience unprecedented visibility in American media and popular culture, those representations are flattened images that reduce complex individuals into simplified and limited categories of identity. I am creating this documentary to blur the boundaries currently restraining the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities through the production of theoretically informed photographic images. Working with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concepts of allo and auto identification, and Judith Butler's notions of performance, intelligibility, and justice in order to form a more nuanced understandings of possibility for queer individuals. Sedgwick and Butler's work will be supplemented with the work of queer theorists such as Michel Foucault, Octavio Gonzalez, and Michael Warner as well as transgender theorists such as Julia Serano and Jack Halberstam. These photographs form a response to pop culture tropes and misinterpretations of the LGBTQ community and show the stories of members of the community. In totality, I intend to pluralize and complicate notions of identity and bodies. Each set of images functions as a mini documentary that becomes part of the collective documentary Queer Images: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans. By talking to my subjects well taking the photographs I develop a short biography that allows for context to the images.