Reclamations

Social conditioning teaches that public displays of intimacy are shameful and are made even more taboo when only men are involved. The images in Reclamations consequently become acts of agency: to examine my own internalized homophobia and fear of intimacy in public spaces, and to create rituals that further the goal of normalizing gay behavior. I used the subjects’ workplace or found a public space as a backdrop for our fictive narratives. After determining what subjects were comfortable doing in front of the camera, we push it a bit further. In this liminal state, my subjects’ transgressive actions made mundane locales into sexually charged spaces.