An overflow crowd gathered at the West Hollywood City Council Chambers to hear about the history of Mapplethorpe’s controversial works as well as his place in our conversation about perfection and exploitation in art, which continues with a major retrospective on view now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The panel—which was moderated by author and Los Angeles County Museum on Fire arts writer William Poundstone and included two curators, a photography collector, and a painter and historian—acknowledged the importance to Mapplethorpe’s legacy the controversy that began in 1989. That summer, a traveling solo exhibit of his work drew the ire of conservative and religious groups, who termed the show’s homoerotic and sadomasochistic themes obscene and the photos pornographic. The controversy gained Mapplethorpe significant fame, but the panelists agreed that the ongoing interest in his work demonstrates a value far deeper than shock.

“At this point we’ve seen so much sexually based work it’s ceased to be shocking,” said Steve Reinstein, a longtime L.A.-based real estate developer and art collector who counts Mapplethorpe among his favorite artists. “I do like work that’s confrontational. I look for work that challenges me.”

Jonathan Weinberg, a painter, art historian, and author of Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art, agreed. “You have to sort of love him and be revolted by him,” Weinberg said of Mapplethorpe. “He’s constantly testing you with his work. That’s part of its power.”

The photography standards of the 1970s and 1980s held that photos document the real and the true. But Mapplethorpe sought the opposite. “‘Things are more beautiful in my pictures than in real life,’” is what Mapplethorpe seems to be saying, said Weinberg. “He takes things and he transforms them. He believes in the magic of art.”

Reinstein agreed: “It goes beyond perfection. What I see is an exaggerated beauty.”

Paul Martineau, who curated the Getty portion of the Mapplethorpe retrospective, noted that the artist’s quest for perfection extended beyond the human form. “He never photographed any wilted flowers,” Martineau said. “Once they started to droop, they were in the trash.”

Britt Salvesen, who curated the LACMA portion of the exhibition, suggested that the fact Mapplethorpe drew inspiration from pop artist Andy Warhol offered some insight into the photographer’s approach to his work. “I think he valued surfaces,” Salvesen said. “Maybe that was another thing he gleaned from Warhol and the way he talked about superficiality. In the pictures you see this attention to the surface.”

“Did that interest in perfection lead Mapplethorpe to exploit some of the people he photographed?”, wondered Poundstone. Mapplethorpe’s Black Book, for instance, is a series of idealized images of African-American men that has spurred some criticism.

Martineau described an interview with one of those men that he came upon while doing research for the exhibition. When asked what it was like to work for Mapplethorpe, the model recounted the photographer asking him how he would like to be pictured. When the model said he had always wanted to be on a pedestal, Mapplethorpe pulled out a plant stand and photographed him that way. “Look very carefully before making judgments about objectifying,” Martineau said.

Weinberg observed that over time, some of the images had taken on a different meaning—some of the men had subsequently died of AIDS, so the portraits had become a way to remember them.

In the question and answer period, an audience member asked if Mapplethorpe’s photographs of women, specifically musician Patti Smith and body building champion Lisa Lyon, bear any relevance in today’s world, where some voters are reported to be struggling with the concept of a woman as president.

Salvesen said Mapplethorpe deliberately included women in his subject matter, and was specifically interested in androgyny. “Lisa Lyon and Patti Smith are two very different manifestations of what he could see as androgynous,” she said.

Martineau’s response suggested a connection between past and present, specifically in his portrayal of Lyon: “She’s represented at her most powerful, a very independent and strong woman.”

The post People Are Still Arguing About Robert Mapplethorpe, and It’s Not About Porn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The CAC was seven blocks from my law office. On the Saturday morning that the exhibit opened to the public, we heard that the Hamilton County prosecutor had empaneled a grand jury to get an indictment by noon, so we sent out scouts to determine when the police were going to arrest the CAC’s director, Dennis Barrie. But Cincinnati is a small town, and our scouts told us that the cops had stopped for lunch along the way.

Eventually Dennis was charged with obscenity for five photos of explicit gay S&M sex and one count of exhibiting two photos of nude children. If convicted, he could have spent two years in jail and paid $2,000 in fines. The CAC would have had to pay $10,000 in fines. The psychic cost for countless artists and museums as they self-censored to avoid obscenity charges also would have been high.

I spent the next six months working on Dennis’s defense; Ultimately a jury judged him not guilty that October. The trial demonstrated that the rights to freedom of expression designated in the Constitution must be fought for—and that they sometimes hinge on narrow legal distinctions.

I had been working on First Amendment cases since the 1970s. That was a decade of changes in attitudes towards art with sexual content. The Kinsey Report’s findings had been accepted by the culture by then, and magazines and filmmaking reflected the sexual revolution. Then, in the 1980s, VHS and Betamax players produced an explosion of pornographic films people could watch in the privacy of their homes instead of theaters. By the late 1980s, sexual content was a bigger part of our culture and our lives.

The controversy over Mapplethorpe’s work is often attributed to his explicit homosexual subject matter. But I wondered if the trouble in Cincinnati wasn’t more about race. There were photographs of black men and white women, after all. And our city is on the edge of the South (Kentucky is just across the river) and 46 percent African American. We had integrated during the ‘70s, but were backsliding into segregated neighborhoods by the ‘90s, with whites moving into small cities and villages in the suburbs.

To me, it was mind-boggling that prosecutors would go after the CAC, a vital and legitimate institution that had been hosting exhibitions since the 1940s. Before trial, we were optimistic that the case would be dismissed, despite the climate of hysteria around Mapplethorpe, because it should have been clear that an organization like the CAC would never do something without a serious artistic purpose. After all, the exhibit was a retrospective of years of work, and it had shown elsewhere in the country. A museum would be a protected institution from these charges, however, the judge said the CAC was not a museum but a gallery because it had no permanent collection. We were boggled by this.

So we had to go to a jury trial. Again, we were optimistic. I was familiar with Miller vs. California, a 1973 case that said that obscenity had to be proven by three so-called prongs. First prong: Would contemporary community standards say that the work as a whole had only prurient interest? Second prong: Did the work show sexual acts in a patently offensive manner? Third prong: Did the work, taken as a whole, lack serious artistic value? I had worked on cases for pornographic movies like The Devil and Mrs. Jones talking about the first and third prong—the movie had a plot and it might be patently offensive but it was not morbidly preoccupied with sex.

A big challenge was to make sure the jury understood the context of the photographs. It was equally important that I would comfortably talk about sexual practices with a more clinical vocabulary, so the jury understood them in a legal context. But we were handicapped because the jury couldn’t see the actual exhibit photos; only the photos and video taken by the police of the exhibit were shown. (The exhibit had gone to Boston by the time of the trial.) So we got all of our expert witnesses to see it at the CAC so they could describe exactly what they saw, and explain the context and the presentation of the photos as art.

In discussing whether the photos had artistic merit, we geared the defense to the idea that art didn’t have to be pretty. It can be challenging. I can see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and leave depressed. But that’s not a problem with the performance—the artistic value doesn’t get determined by what you feel afterwards. For example, the importance for the world of images of the Holocaust is huge. We don’t like those images, but they are vital to telling the story.

That was a winning argument. The jury deliberated for two hours and acquitted Dennis Berrie and the CAC.

The trial created an important history of a jury validating this approach to art. It sent a message that artists and museums can tell us things that we often don’t or can’t talk about easily. The way times and norms change was part of the exhibit. You could see how Mapplethorpe evolved from seeking attention and photographing himself toward the more interior still lives and portraits. Art really reflects the period of time it’s made in. We don’t come to grips with what happened in that time until 20 to 30 years later. It’s good to see that Mapplethorpe’s work today is being recognized as the artistic accomplishment—and advancement—that it really is.

In retrospect we made another smart decision: The prosecutor had offered to drop charges on the five photos if Dennis would plead guilty to two misdemeanors of showing nude children. We said no. Looking back, the repercussions of taking a plea deal for disseminating photos of a minor in a state of nudity could have been a death blow for the CAC—and disastrous for Dennis. Now with all the consciousness over those labeled sexual offenders, such a crime would be a felony and could land him on a sexual offender registry.

For me, winning the case—in a trial that we made about art—was a great moment. The Mapplethorpe exhibit divided the city, and the art world there split against itself. Everybody was afraid. The CAC withdrew from the local arts association so they wouldn’t tarnish the symphony. By winning the case on grounds that this was art, that it was important for humanity, the CAC’s reputation was bolstered. In the years since then it’s raised money for a beautiful new building and a collection.

But that case (and others from that time) has also scared museums and artists who don’t have the resources to fight. There’s a lot of self-censorship by museums, which are especially leery of showing work with children. The repercussions of offering work that could be labeled “dirty” remain serious. Museums’ ability to show what they think is important is still somewhat dependent upon who is running the Justice Department.

Artists who are considered on the edge are still targets. I recently defended a young photographer who was doing a series on birth and death. He got permission to take photos at the morgue, but foolishly sent them out for developing. He was reported to the police and prosecuted for abuse of a corpse. At the end of the trial the prosecutor kicked the box of photographs and told the jury, “Mr. Sirkin’s defense of art is bullshit. Art is only what we’d take home and hang on the wall.”

The artist spent 12 months in prison.

The post I Defended Mapplethorpe in the Trial That Drew the Line Between Art and Obscenity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The summer after I graduated high school, in 1989, I worked in a Subway sandwich shop and dated Sara Rushing. It took me years to realize I had never been happier, watching Field of Dreams with Sara and making out with her in the front seat of my car outside Ross Viselman’s house. But, when August came along, I broke up with her quickly and coldly. I was going to Harvard and my future awaited. That fall I had my first major depression. I was still in the midst of it when Cincinnati became national news because the sheriff arrested the director of the Contemporary Art Center for displaying certain photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

My first instinct on the Mapplethorpe affair was then, and still is now—as we look back on the heels of the 25th anniversary, and on the occasion of two simultaneous and coordinated retrospectives of his work—to stand with my arms folded, staring over from the coastal civilizations where I’ve lived as an adult to that old river town to say: What a backwards place. My first impulse is to tsk, or to quip, or to expound with my smart friends on the Things Stupid People Do. I want to enact some ritual to distance me from my provincial past. No, more than make distance, I feel the need to cast that place out, to perform an exorcism. And what better embodiment of the demon than a sheriff incarcerating a curator of the arts?

But I want to question that instinct, reconsider that scolding attitude. I want to critique it, even, though it’s a difficult critique, because I haven’t forsaken the practical attitude, i.e., opposition to censorship via state power. I’m all for Mapplethorpe hanging in a museum and I’m all for Howl coming across the borders in 1956 and I can see the straight line between these cases and modern China and Iran and Syria and Bangladesh, where artists have their fingernails pulled out and go to jail and may be killed.

So, yes, a clear stand on the Cincinnati case is in order.

But I still want to write a brief against tsking, make a plea against that cluck of tongue, because it misses the point of these conflicts, and, if I may say it, their value. We may look at Cincinnati and see backwards people come to halt progress, but if we stand in such an attitude, our arms folded, I think we miss the more fundamental human schism that the case brings to light.

Everyone has a threshold for disorder, above which they come to feel threatened. I take my understanding of this eternal dialectic from Gregory Orr’s Poetry as Survival, which argues that the basic pleasure of art has to do with stimuli bringing us right about to that threshold. The art puts before us some kind of disorder (in the way of raw emotion, or characters in conflict, or far-out existential questions) and then finds some way to tame it, restoring order, creating the sort of calm and relief we can only really feel when we have been excited and on the edge of danger.

If we apply Orr’s idea about the function of art to the Cincinnati case, we see—I think this is the more compassionate and clear-headed view—not stupid people opposing smart people, but two different kinds of people with different thresholds for disorder.

And by re-framing this conflict in such a way, we see that the clashes there are not ones to be won for all time, but, rather, indicators of the fundamental schisms that make us whole.

Every organic system, whether a person or a nation, has a variety of these internal schisms. Certain places, certain moments, are especially potent in bringing them into view.

For the modern U.S., Cincinnati is one such potent place. As Ohio goes in national elections, so goes the country, so we are all sailing, more or less, on the winds that gust through that town. Or I should say crosswinds, because what defines Cincinnati is its unusually awkward juxtapositions. Free and slave once juxtaposed in Cincinnati and gave us Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which was composed there) and Beloved (which was set there). German, Irish, and southern Anglo-Saxon juxtapose in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a Jewish city, and an African-American city, and an Appalachian city, and a big banking city, and home to Procter & Gamble, the largest consumer products company in the world. Urban and rural juxtapose in Cincinnati with an unusual intensity, because a short drive from downtown and the hills above it—where there is a symphony, fine museums and parks, a conservatory, independent cinema, and five-star restaurants—you can be in horse country.

Art, like politics, thrives on these fissures. It jackhammers into the fault lines that separate us, and exposes and provokes the earthquake emotions.

Even 26 years later, these Mapplethorpe photographs provoke me still—especially the artist’s self-portrait with a whip up his rectum and his gaze turned toward the camera behind him; also, the little girl whose dress has floated up and exposed her genitalia. These shots make me uncomfortable. They give me a stitch in my gut. That’s great. That’s art. But if I have the capacity, in this instance, to hold that discomfort, to respond without reacting, I want to hesitate before I judge those who are pushed further.

I’m not saying that we should stand down. I’m not saying that when they march into the gallery with their batons, that we ought not call our lawyers, marshal our defense, have it out. When I saw a video recently of the jury foreman announcing their verdict of not guilty in the Cincinnati case, I felt a primal surge of pleasure, of hope.

But to the same extent we wish to put down art’s opponents, I think we need to restrain our own haughty impulses. Let those arms come out of their defensive fold and hang down by our sides. Let the tongue’s tsk ease into a sigh. When we see wrong versus right out there, in the world around us, let’s look for a simulacrum of that struggle right here, in the world inside us. When we see people offended and protecting their idea of order, let’s not speak until we have searched and found an awareness of our borders that we would defend, with whatever means available to us, were they breached.

The irony is that Mapplethorpe, known now as art’s Avatar of Edge, was, in his methods and his aesthetics, such a formalist. His images of disorder were deeply romantic, his outré sex acts were shot in a studio, his wilding was classically composed. “I was a Catholic,” he once told the BBC. “I went to church every Sunday. The way I arrange things is very Catholic. It’s always been that way when I put things together. Very symmetrical.”

I’ll leave the subject of Mapplethorpe’s own schisms for another time. For myself, I know looking at his work, feeling such ambivalence about it, I can see that I am not a man who left a quaint past for a civilized future. I am trying my best to be wild-minded. But I am forever drawn, too, by the thatched huts of my provincial past, by the comfort of a car in a garage. Maybe I am a liberal with some reactionary in my heart. I want progress, difference. But I also want a time machine to go back to the front seat of my 1986 Nissan. I want to make out with Sara again, drop her off, and drive home to my mom’s house, where she cooks me French toast in the morning.

The post Why I Don’t Blame Cincinnati for Putting Art on Trial appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While Mapplethorpe perfected his iconic style, the independently wealthy Wagstaff made a name for himself as a voracious collector. Wagstaff chased photographs back to the form’s beginnings, collecting images created as early as the 1830s, some of which he picked up from thrift shops and flea markets. He championed the work of little-known 19th century photographers like Gustave Le Gray, whom he compared to Rembrandt, and Julia Margaret Cameron, later renowned for her soft-focus portraiture. He also added contemporary photographers like Jo Ann Callis and Edmund Teske, as well as anonymous works, to his collection. “This is the man who set the aesthetic benchmarks for what’s good in photography,” art historian Clark Worswick told The New York Times’ Philip Gefter, who later wrote Wagstaff’s biography. Reviewing a 1978 exhibition drawn from Wagstaff’s burgeoning trove of photographs, a Washington Post critic declared, “Sam Wagstaff is the artist that one most remembers after looking at this show.”

In just a decade, Wagstaff amassed one of the world’s most significant collections of photography. In 1984, the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired his more than 25,000 images as a founding pillar of their Department of Photography. Three years later, Wagstaff died from AIDS-related pneumonia.

To accompany their major retrospective “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium,” the Getty is presenting “The Thrill of the Chase: The Wagstaff Collection of Photographs.” This three-gallery exhibition contains 101 works—both recognizable masterpieces and less well-known selections—that highlight Wagstaff’s passionate pursuit of fine art photography.

“Wagstaff was attracted to photographs that had the power to get his imagination going,” said exhibition curator Paul Martineau in a recent interview. In reflecting on what set Wagstaff’s collecting apart, Martineau quoted Wagstaff himself: “‘Beauty can be found in truth, or better still, in unexpected places.’”

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In June 1989, I was 22, a newly declared art history major at Northwestern University, about to start an internship at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The child of an art teacher and a psychiatrist who grew up in the small, accepting town of Lincoln, Massachusetts, I’d been going to museums in the Boston area, and making and looking at art, since I was young. I lived just a short distance from the de Cordova Sculpture and Gardens Museum, where I took my first art class and saw my first museum exhibition. Growing up, I’d known museums as refined places.

My assignment from the Corcoran’s education department was to give tours of their upcoming exhibition “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment.” What I knew of Mapplethorpe wasn’t much: His work was provocative; he’d died of complications from AIDS just months before.

Ajitto, 1981, Robert Mapplethorpe. Gelatin silver print.

 
When I checked in at the Corcoran’s security desk on my first morning, though, I immediately knew something was wrong. I was told to go straight to an all-staff meeting already in progress, and that I would meet my supervisor later. I quietly took a seat in the back of the auditorium, which was alive with tension and anger. People were yelling and storming out. I didn’t know a soul and had no idea what was going on.

What was going on, I learned later, was an explosion in the culture wars. In May, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms had denounced a photograph of an inexpensive crucifix in a container of urine (Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ) as vulgar and undeserving of federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Mapplethorpe exhibit, which had also received NEA funding, got swept up in that obscenity controversy a few weeks later, when Congress found out that “The Perfect Moment”—which included photographs of very explicit sexual acts in addition to pictures of flowers and formal portraits—was about to open at the Corcoran. Fearing protests and loss of funding, the Corcoran’s director had decided to cancel the exhibition with less than three weeks to go before its opening. The exhibition would eventually be shown in D.C. that summer, but not at the Corcoran—it appeared at the Washington Project for the Arts from July 21 to August 13, 1989, to record-breaking crowds.

Inside the museum, employees were shaken and angered. Outside the museum, protestors decried the cancellation, projecting images of Mapplethorpe’s work on the museum’s walls. In July, Helms introduced a law in Congress to prohibit the National Endowment for the Arts from funding “obscene” art. When the Mapplethorpe show later traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, both the Center and its director were charged with obscenity.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand why people were so upset. I knew that Mapplethorpe’s artwork tested our social boundaries, but I wasn’t offended by it. I knew that Jesse Helms was a powerful, conservative politician. But I was young and idealistic, and didn’t fully understand how Mapplethorpe and this politician were connected. I certainly didn’t know how a museum could find itself caught in the crosshairs of the culture wars.

I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by great art and creative people all my life. As a student and in my personal life, I’ve long been immersed in photography and its history. My in-laws (Richard and Ellen Sandor) let me explore their amazing photography collection. To this day, going through their house feels like a creative journey. They introduced me to—among other things—the power and beauty of Mapplethorpe’s portrait of the female bodybuilder, Lisa Lyon.

And that summer I was in Washington, I had just enjoyed a great traveling exhibition called “On the Art of Fixing A Shadow: 150 Years of Photography” that happened to be at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. the same time I was. That show helped me to learn more about great photographers, and to equate Robert Mapplethorpe’s compositional abilities with those of such artists as Edward Weston.

After the Mapplethorpe exhibition was cancelled, I don’t remember many conversations taking place within the office about it. I think staff members—and the entire organization—were exhausted. The days and weeks after the cancellation seemed all about the future, not the past.

The cancellation of the Mapplethorpe show was a blow for the Corcoran, but it was a strange stroke of luck for me. I was no longer tasked with giving prescribed tours; instead I was invited to help prepare the Corcoran’s next show, “Japanese Photography in America, 1920–1940,” the first major exhibition of work by Japanese-American photographers. As I recall, this exhibition was already scheduled to be at the Corcoran, but they moved up the opening date. The museum needed all hands on deck, and I did more than most interns ever get to. I helped unpack the works of art. I researched and wrote copy for the wall panels. I stood by curators and educators as they hung the show. It was an incredible learning experience.

Carnival of Onions, Early 1930s, Midori Shimoda. Gelatin silver print.

 
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Mapplethorpe show and what might have been. I knew the show was travelling to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston the next summer, so in 1990 I applied to—practically begged—the ICA to take me as a curatorial intern. My official assignment was to conduct research on an upcoming exhibition, but my real goal was to see how the museum responded to the Mapplethorpe show under its roof.

Tension was high. Nothing could be done or said about the exhibition without direct authorization from David Ross, the ICA’s director. From the curatorial offices we watched men stage kiss-offs in support of the show as motorcycle cops cruised by, preparing for unrest. But despite the anxiety, there was no incident. For visitors and staff, the previous controversy about the show was simply a non-issue.

Politicians seemed to have moved on, perhaps because they had had some success with condemning “obscene” art. Congress got what it wanted with an anti-obscenity clause in October 1989. While the Corcoran Gallery of Art was located only a few blocks from the White House, Boston had the advantage of not being, geographically speaking, in the center of the controversy. I like to think that Boston, my hometown, enjoyed a moment to show off its newfound tolerance.

My summers with Mapplethorpe were an unusual introduction to an arts career. But rather than putting me off, they revealed to me that museums are interesting, dynamic places that can alter people’s perceptions of the world. I suddenly understood how the arts and the humanities are living forces in our culture, tied up intimately with politics and policy.

By a remarkable coincidence, Los Angeles, my new hometown, is bringing the two guide-stars of my career into alignment again as “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium” comes to the Getty Museum and LACMA and “Making Waves: Japanese American Photography, 1920–1940” comes to the Japanese American National Museum this summer. I’m looking forward to visiting with these pictures again and thanking them for what they gave so many years ago.

Untitled, 2016, Jack Ludden. Digital photomontage of Self-portrait, 2014 (left), Self-portrait, 1989 (right), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1989.

 
*An earlier version left out Lisa Lyon’s name.

The post How a Museum Cancelling a Controversial Mapplethorpe Exhibition Changed My Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In classic gay coming-of-age stories, the small-town misfit escapes to the big city—the bigger the better. Robert Mapplethorpe left his home in Floral Park, Queens for art school in Brooklyn and then New York City, where he fell in with a group of artists and eccentrics, most notably Patti Smith, Sam Wagstaff, and George Dureau. “I come from suburban America,” he once remarked. “It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.”

Mapplethorpe found an artistic oasis in New York. The subversive nature of his photographs—boldly homoerotic and gleefully taboo—stand in stark contrast with the Roman Catholic values of his 1950s childhood. In New York City he was first able to explore his sexual inclinations. In New York City he first picked up a camera. His many self-portraits in those early years—often staring straight at the camera as if looking for his reflection in the lens—point to the fact that there, in that city, he had literally found himself.

I’ve had the luxury of coming of age as a queer person after the violence of Stonewall and Harvey Milk’s assassination, in the era of gay-marriage legislation. And yet I know that our community has paid a price for progress: Queer America is now divided into the “acceptable” and the “perverse.” By acceptable I mean the sexless, “family-friendly” portrayals found on network television and in commercials. Think Modern Family. And by perverse I mean everything else: polygamy, internet chat rooms, the kink community. The old invisibility was dangerous, yes, but a curated semi-visibility is no less harmful. I can be Ellen (funny, devoid of controversy, and successful) or I can be invisible. The game is rigged: Something is always left out of the frame.

Molly Landreth, the Seattle-based photographer known for her revolutionary approach to queer portraiture, grew up in a small agricultural valley in Washington state, an hour’s drive south of the Canadian border.

Landreth left her hometown for Scripps College in Claremont, California. While a freshman, she took her camera on frequent trips to Los Angeles to visit her cousin, spending time with him and his group of queer friends as they got ready for nights out on the town. Too young for LA’s clubs, Landreth was only able to participate by photographing the ritual of primping, accessorizing, and glamorizing. It was her way of reveling in the beauty of sexuality while still piecing together her own, safely out of the frame.

Meg and Renee, 2007, Molly Landreth. Seattle, Washington.

But here the familiar narrative takes a discernible turn. Instead of making Los Angeles her artistic oasis, Landreth went back home. It was there, not the city, where she was able to turn the lens on herself.

Fascinated by the seeming contradictions between her childhood home and the world she had documented in Los Angeles, she began to take “a bazillion self-portraits” with her best friend and fellow photographer Jenny Riffle. They photographed themselves and each other against the landscapes of their hometown, looking for palpable evidence of their shifting identities.

In one photograph taken by Riffle, titled “Wallpaper,” Landreth stands against the swooping bird pattern of her parents’ living room walls, boxed into a small nook created by a Victorian-style chair and a modest side table bearing an oppressively oversized lamp. She looks cramped, out of place, suffocated by the ornate room that can barely contain her. Landreth looks directly at the camera, a practice she would encourage in her later portraits.

Landreth continued to seek out apparent contradictions between subject and environment. From 2004 to 2010, she worked on the Embodiment Project, taking portraits of queer people across the country.

Landreth told me that during this time she often thought of a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe in which two men pose in a traditional living room, both clad in leather, one standing and holding a chain tied around the seated one’s neck. The picture “queers” an iconic American portrait. Landreth sought to do something similar. Many of her portraits nod to classic images: In one photograph from the Embodiment Project, two women lie together in a parked car at a scenic overlook, the city lights glowing behind them. The scene seems straight out of either a teenage love story or a horror movie, depending on how you look at it.

Clare Mercy, 2007, Molly Landreth. Bellingham, Washington.

When she began the project in the early 2000s, Landreth said, she didn’t see the kinds of queer people she knew in the media—or even in fine arts work from New York City. She didn’t want to keep documenting the curated semi-visible: queers from the upper middle class, or from New York. She turned to the growing world of the internet, entering keywords into MySpace, reaching out to people who seemed to have a complex identity—something unfamiliar. And she wanted them to participate directly in the process, to take back some of the power from the viewer, choosing how they wanted to be represented. She didn’t want her pictures to force anyone into a familiar narrative.

She found plenty of willing collaborators. Subjects chose where they would like to be photographed and which outfit they wanted to wear. One woman is shirtless, sitting on the trunk of her car with a field behind her, the car plastered in bumper stickers proclaiming “I heart dykes” and “Hate is not a family value” below her boot heels. In another work, a young trans man stands outside his house, the only clue to his queerness being a belt buckle that spells “BOY” across it in bold letters. (He told Landreth that, just like the belt, he could take his identity on and off.) Perhaps one of Landreth’s most unlikely pictures is of two Hassidic Jews seated at a kitchen table in their eclectic home, which includes a NO WAR sign and a hanging Kermit the Frog doll.

Ronni and Jo, 2005, Molly Landreth. Seattle, Washington.

Many of the photos feel intimate; looking at them, you feel as if you are intruding, and your eyes wander across the image cautiously. After all, by their very inclusion in the project each subject has outed him or herself. You are now complicit in the outing, and this fact binds you closer to the image and the subject staring back at you.

Looking through Landreth’s photographs, I feel a mounting response to my disquiet about queer representation. I don’t see myself in Landreth’s subjects, necessarily. In fact I’m not sure I’m supposed to. Instead, I wonder if a portrait can ever really capture a person, let alone an entire community. Particularly a community as fragmented and diverse as Queer America, dispersed throughout cities, suburbs, and small towns all over the country.

So I turn inward. I wonder which setting I would choose to be photographed in. Which clothes I would wear. Which emotion I would convey.

In my hypothetical portrait I sit in my own childhood living room, on the green couch that’s been there since before I was born, with a chain wrapped around my neck—an homage to Mapplethorpe. Only there is no one holding the chain. I’m alone, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, free to be queer, to be a queer, visible for the first time. The game is rigged, sure: Something is always left out of the frame. But I’m playing it. And I’m putting my whole self in the frame.

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