Artist Statement

While attending the Boston Museum School in the early 1980s I became part of what has come to be known as the Boston School. We were a small group of artists who shared an attitude toward life. We photographed ourselves and each other and performed in different states of drag and debauchery. At the same time, through reading works by Alfred Jarry and Isidore Ducasse, I became fascinated by the marvelous, the irrational, and the accidental.

Around 1982 my friend Mark Morrisroe gave me my first Polaroid camera. With the support of the Polaroid Artist Support Program, I spent thirty years obsessed with the fine art of Polaroid 665 Positive/Negative film.

I experimented with the instability of the negative, deliberately evading the fixing protocols and placing them aside for as long as a year after exposure. The negatives accumulated a series of changes and distortions that produced prints with a vibrancy stemming partly from chance and partly from intent. The end result produced a surreal alteration of my subjects, giving an air of alchemical mystery.

When Polaroid stopped manufacturing this film, which was my primary medium, I found myself having to reinvent my approach to photography. In 2010, I created my last portrait of New York City’s trans wonder Kenny Kenny with Polaroid 665 Positive/Negative film. I turned to using Fuji 3000 with the same Polaroid 110a camera to explore and deepen my content; looking for something I call a transmagical expression.

Susan Sontag’s book On Photography was a large influence on my early work, particularly the idea that a photograph, with the passing of time, becomes something on its own and replaces our memory of the subject. Yet I found that a photograph doesn’t replace memory. Instead, it transforms it into something else.

For example, the photograph of Shelley Marlow is not Shelley Marlow. It is a persona of Shelley, a particular part of Shelley that was created for the photograph, to communicate who she wants to be (yet not necessarily who she is). We examined the masculine and feminine in each of us, questioning whether it is necessary to define ourselves as a she or a he, when we are often neither or both.

This is the transmagical, the metamorphosis of the person, the freedom of personal expression, and the ability to be whomever we choose. It is a world created from a mixture of deadpan reality, fantastical make-believe, and a theater of elaborate and fictitious titles, adding another layer of intrigue to identity performance.

Fig 1.

Ladies & Gentlemen, President Shelley Marlow, 2013.

Fig 2.

Mister Shelley, 2013.