I met Alex through work on a long road trip to northern Minnesota and back. Though the course of our trip, besides discussing pedestrian infrastructure and the minutia of our individual engineering day jobs, we also discussed our outside-of-work selves. Alex is an occasional burlesque performer, who advocates for non-binary and disability visibility through their work. I, an amateur photographer interested in exploring identity and gender, clicked with them immediately. We set up a date to meet later in September and have a portrait shoot.
We ended up working on two different concepts the evening of our shoot. The first, which you will have to see later, worked with colored light and a alternating masculine and feminine looks. The second, this set, was in the dark and using glow sticks as the only light. I’ve been really trying to learn lighting in images, and I love using unusual light sources to obscure my subjects. I used high-speed black and white film to capture these, and decided in post to keep the dust and grain on the images. I think it adds something to the ghost-like feel of the final images.
Because of the challenge of focusing and metering in almost pitch darkness, only a few of these final images really clicked for me, but I find them both powerful and interesting. I also included one shot which was supposed to be the burner at the beginning of the roll, but turned out too good not to share. I’m looking forward to sharing the first part of the shoot once I get to developing all of my color rolls of film I have hanging around.
Camera: Pentax K1000
Lens: SMC Pentax-A 50mm 1:1.7
Film: Ilford Delta 3200 Professional.
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