Body, Gender, Me

Thursday, September 10, 2009
Today was my first class in The Body and Photography, a graduate-level seminar course designed for students interested in exploring the body photographically and producing works of art that are inspired by the body. There are weekly four-hour class sessions and additional class field trips throughout the semester. One of the field trips will be an all-day gallery and museum hop in New York City on October 23. There are eleven students in my class, including a few familiar faces from my other photography courses. All are seniors or graduate students, so there are some serious photographers here. Our first assignment asks us to produce a body of work that represents an exploration of our own bodies. I'm going to have myself some fun with that. The course is taught by world-renowned Gabriel Martinez, who also taught my Photography I course. Gabe is the man who inspired me to be a fine art photographer in the same vein as Nan Goldin. My class watched a film called "Naked States" about Spencer Tunick, the outlaw photographer who successfully captured images of dozens to hundreds of nude people lying in front of public places.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Today I storyboarded some ideas for my first project in The Body and Photography entitled "Self." I want to try my hand at recreating a well-known marble statue called Hermaphrodite Sleeping. I don't want to make a verbatim copy of it, but rather inject my own artistic uniquess into it.

Thursday, September 17, 2009
Today in The Body and Photography - class 2 - my class watched "The Legend of Leigh Bowery," a documentary of the life of a genius fashion designer and performance artist who was recognized for always taking his style to the cutting edge and beyond. Bowery was unique, often misunderstood, full of contradictions, and loved delving into controversy. He was a walking artistic statement and we will probably never see someone as talented as Leigh again in our lifetime. I've been thinking about producing black and white photos for my first assignment. There's a lot more boldness and subtlety that can be felt in black and white prints versus color. I wonder if the class is truly ready to see images of a real-life transgender classmate. • Our assigned reading was "The Performance Movement," a short article describing performance artists from the 1960s onward. Many performance artists didn't like having their performances captured in still images, but they saw it as a necessary vehicle to expose their art to a larger audience. One performance artist, Ma Liuming, particularly interested me because his performances involved his female alter-ego, Fen-Ma Liuming. It turns out there are a lot of Asian performance artists, including Tehching Hsieh, known for exploring the limits of his own physical and mental stamina by creating extreme endurance tests, Patty Chang, who videotaped her discomfort when she let loose live eels underneath her blouse, Young Hay, who photographed himself in many cities throughout the world while hiding behind a large blank canvas, Zhang Huan, who took pictures of himself smothered with foam and placing old black and white family pictures in his mouth, and Tseng Kwong Chi, who dressed as Mao Tse Tung posing in front of well-known tourist sites. Of equal importance are the Western artists, such as Jemima Stehli, who created unusual self-portraits using mirrors in her studio, Chris Burden, who shot himself in the arm in one performance and starved himself for 22 days while lying on a small platform in another, Dennis Oppenheim, who suspended his body between two masonry walls, Charles Ray who used his body as part of minimalist sculptures, and Roman Signer, who doused himself with gunpowder while wearing a flame-resistent suit and setting himself on fire.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Today I storyboarded some more ideas for the "Self" project. Continuing on the nude theme of Hermaphrodite Sleeping, I want to create images that focus on the uniqueness of my body and leave the viewer in a state of guessing, confusion, self-awareness, and perhaps understanding of things that are different. I'm not sure if I should focus on just body parts in my images or whole body images. Is it important that I show my face in my images? How much of my body do I want to show? My spouse isn't particularly thrilled with the idea of others seeing my nude body, but I'm trying to convince her that it's for art and not pornography.

Thursday, September 24, 2009
Today in The Body and Photography - class 3 - we saw a massive slide presentation of various interpretations and depictions of the body from 44 well-known artists. A number of artists had very controversial photographs and the best ones were usually highly graphic yet thought-provoking. The photographs served as examples of the direction we could take our first assignment. I saw it as a way to challenge us to think outside the box and perhaps experiment with possibilities and situations that we would normally not take chances on. There are several themes I'd like to tackle, including my take on Hermaphrodite Sleeping, another with controversial religious undertones, and some that are pure fantasy and fun.

Saturday, September 26, 2009
Today I worked on my photo sessionfor the "Self" project. With the help of my assistant, Kristyn, we captured over 400 images of three different outfits in three and a half hours. We experimented with different lighting scenarios and poses. We even combined elements of two outfits together for the final series. I believe that every good photographer has a great team of assistants who can help with lighting, posing, and even photography. I've worked with Kristyn for the past two years on various photography projects, including my weekly parties at a popular dance club and various other parties throughout the region and New York City. She has a good command of capturing "the moment" and I decided to use that skill to my advantage during the photo session by directing her on what aspects of my body, what moods, and what details I wanted her to capture. It was sometimes a maddening process of me getting into position, her capturing the image, and me reviewing the image before we went to the next pose. I ran into some problems with posing for the Hermaphrodite Sleeping images. I'm a pretty flexible person and I could find no feasible way to turn my head in the exact same position as the marbled hermaphrodite while having my body positioned like the statue. I believe the artist took some artistic liberties in designing his work. I could see why he would want to turn the head that way - to confuse the viewer - but it is almost physically impossible for me to pose in the same way and I am not sure very many human beings can do so, too, so I did the best I could given the physical limitations keeping i mind that the pose and the shape of the body is the most important aspect of each image.

Sunday, September 27, 2009
I started editing the massive set of "Self" images last night, and pared it down to about 310. It's hard to discard images that look similar to other images because you don't want to discard the wrong image. Sometimes one image has a subtle nuance that makes it better than another image that looks almost alike. There are some very humorous images in the set - humorous to me, anyway - so we'll see how well the class responds to them.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009
I pared the 400 images down to 310 and from there I selected the best 40. This was an extremely difficult process as I had to make a lot of difficult choices. I showed the 40 I selected to my professor and from there we chose the best six. He loved the Hermaphrodite Sleeping ones as well as the risqué witchie and nun images. He explained, "All of the straight guys in the class are going to go 'Whoa, she's hot...' and then they'll see that and then go WHOA!!!" The images draw you in that way from left to right and from top to down. "I can see a couple of these in our gallery now," he said. The class' work will be presented at The Philomathean Society at Penn in December.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Today is print day and I have a new Epson R1900 to learn how to use. I've always let Photoshop manage my colors for color prints. This time I wanted to do it right by using a dedicated color profile from the manufacturer, so I diligently installed all of the software, drivers, and color profiles and printed my two color photos. They just didn't look right. They looked washed out and in a strange blue hue, nothing like what I see in Photoshop. I proceed with printing my black and white prints. Ah!!! This printer truly makes beautiful black and white prints. I tweak the output just a little, three times for each print, compare all of the prints, and choose the best one for my class. I then revert back to Photoshop managing colors, print out my color prints again, and this time they looked fantastic! Spot on! There was still something off about the prints. They were too dark. I'll do some research later tonight to figure out how to correct that.

Thursday, October 1, 2009
I reprinted all of my prints this morning with a tweak on the output levels. It turns out all of the shadow details were hard to see in the first set of prints. The fix is to tweak the black end of the output level spectrum so that the almost-blacks print lighter than they have. I upped the black end to 15 and I could see a very noticeable difference in my prints. The shadow details were now visible and I could now see the folds in the nun's habit and can distinguish between my hair and my hat in the witchie images. My class critique was a success. I succeeded in portraying my version of the Hermaphrodite Sleeping statue and the other images provided a look at a whimsical and mischevous side of me. Everyone loved the black and white images. I received lots of rave reviews on them from various friends, too. The images can be found here. The next project is to produce a substantial body of work based on the female body. I could do my own body again, but I want to focus on someone else.

Thursday, October 8, 2009
Today's class had a nude model in the classroom studio. Gabe showed us many different lighting techniques using Pro Photo strobe lights and Lowell DP lights, reflectors, umbrellas, and softboxes. A number of us signed up for fifteen minute photo sessions with the model. When it was my turn, I whipped out my Leica M8 and took all of my photos handheld in ambient light. That saved me a lot of time from having to set up the strobe unit or using a tripod. I may want to hire this model for my next assignment. We watched a slideshow with plenty of inspirational images from 32 different artists. I watched the world premiere of Season 5 of Art in the Twenty-First Century tonight. William Kentridge was one of the artists featured. I used one of his charcoal drawings for a project in my Large Format Photography class.

Friday, October 9, 2009
Tonight I went to the AxD Gallery with my friends, Peter and Kristyn, to see Vivienne Maricevic's "Shooting Men" gallery that featured gay men, transvestites, male-to-female transsexuals, and female-to-male transsexuals. Vivienne is quite possibly the first photographer to ever capture images of female-to-male transsexuals. I described her work as "very provocative." She thanked me and admitted that she wants to continue her work photographing transsexuals, but the problem nowadays is "every transsexual wants money to be photographed," she said. I told her that my friends and I are not like our greedy transsisters. We'd be willing to be photographed for free. You have to be a total retard to refuse to be photographed by a famous photographer! I agreed to help Vivienne gather enough models so that someday in the future she'll come down to Philly again to take pictures of us and then - who knows? - we might be famous in a book or gallery like the lovely transsexuals she had on the walls of the AxD Gallery. That's me and Vivienne at the AxD Gallery in the picture to the right.

Saturday, October 10, 2009
I tried calling my female model today, but she never called me back, so I have to go with my original plan of using a transgender female model. I think photos of a transgender female are ultimately more interesting than photos of a genetic female because they're going to be different from everyone else's photos. If you saw her, you would probably never guess that she was born male. I agreed not to show any genitals in my final images. I found some foam balls and cones that might be interesting to use in the photo session.

Monday, October 12, 2009
My transgender model agreed to do the photo session on Saturday and asked if she could bring her paintball gun. "Paintball gun?" I thought to myself. "That's a good idea!" She won a paintball championship in Orlando last week. It should be cool and unique to have her pose with her paintball gun.

Thursday, October 15, 2009
After watching a documentary on Nobuyoshi Araki in my photography class, we were graced by the presence of guest lecturer Becky Young who founded the photography program at Penn thirty years ago. She gave us an overview of her nude photography work from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Becky's work was inspirational and groundbreaking for its time. Gabe taught us how to use several pieces of equipment many of us were unfamiliar with, including a Pro-7A Generator, a "portable" battery pack, a flash bracket to take a camera-mounted flash off of a camera's hot shoe, and a Quantum Qflash T5d flash unit. He mentioned that he would be teaching us how to use the ring light when we have the male model in class. Nancy, one of my classmates, liked the ambient lighting scenario I helped set up for her in our last in-class photo session, so we agreed to set up sequential time slots so we could both take pictures of the male model at the same time.

Saturday, October 17, 2009
Due to a two-hour drive in a Nor'easter rainstorm, my model was an hour late, but we still managed to complete our photo session for my second project in The Body and Photography class. We captured a lot of great poses and what made the session fun is that we enjoy each other's company. Now I have to go through all 185 images and select the best ones to present to class. As most of you know, I'm using a transgender woman in my project, so already my images will be edgy.

Sunday, October 18, 2009
From 185 images, I selected the best 27. From these 27, I have to decide on the best six for Thursday's class. What makes this easier than my previous assignment is three of the images can be strung together tryptic style.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Today was a big day for me with meetings all day at work, in school, and for my upcoming art gallery at the William Way Community Center. Gabe liked my images and selected ones he liked but left the door open to allow me to select from a whole bunch he thought were good. That means I have the final say to choose three or more of the remaining six and present them in addition to the three he liked. Gabe and I hung up three of my images from my Self project in the hallways of the art school. I'm infamous now... hee hee. After work, I saw Candice, the art director of William Way's gallery and she liked the images I wanted to present for my "Clublife" series. She also liked my Self images and said I could present those as well if I felt strongly about them. That is so cool!

Thursday, October 22, 2009
My Body and Photography class responded favorably to my female body images for my second project. Most thought that the following series was the most successful in that it mimicked the kind of photo series style one would find in a Playboy magazine interview of a famous person.

The class liked my paintball images, too, but felt they could've been a little riskier. The class thought that the schoolgirl theme was cliché, however, so thankfully I showed only one of those images. My next project, based on the male physique, is going to be really, really wacky. Hee hee. It is worth noting that most snapshooters wouldn't be able to achieve images like this because the camera would focus on the wrong object, such as the hand, when the mouth should be in focus.

Gabe asked me to do a performance art piece for the opening gallery at The Philomathean Society. I think I know what I want to do and it will involve my hair. I hope someone can record my performance.

Friday, October 23, 2009
My class and I went on a field trip to New York City where we visited the International Center of Photography and over 25 smaller galleries in the Chelsea area. Some galleries were wide open spaces with two-story-high ceilings. Others were nothing more than a single small room with four walls. On the whole, a lot of stuff was exciting and unique. Osang Gwon's hyperrealistic photo-sculptures made of overlapping photographs in his Deodorant Type exhibit was awesome. Janine Antoni, one of my favorite artists, exhibited an incredible 72x116 image of herself suspended in a children's room with a dollhouse attached to her lower torso.

Thursday, October 29, 2009
Today's Body and Photography class had a nude model in the classroom studio. Gabe gave us a quick introduction to the 21-megapixel Canon EOS 5D Mark II and showed us some new lighting techniques using a Profoto Beauty Dish with and without honeycomb grid, a Profoto ring flash, and a gel filter attachment. A number of us signed up for fifteen minute photo sessions with the model. I teamed up with another student and we set up a lighting scenario that we were both satisfied with. Our combined times gave us a more comfortable and satisfying thirty minute session. Instead of using my Leica M8, I used my über rocket this time, my Nikon D300 with 17-55mm lens. This is a great combo for creating clean, crisp images, but they seem to lack the creamy rich character of the Leica M8 images I captured last time. After class, I was walking a few steps behind two female students who were admiring the photographs from my class on the school gallery boards. They continued walking and one of the students stopped to look at the images of my nude body. "Look at that... those legs! I wish I had that body," she said to her friend. "No, you don't," I remarked with a smile as I passed them by. I don't think they put two and two together as they continued admiring my body.

Saturday, October 31, 2009
I completed a photo session with my friend Jake today, a genetic male who enjoys dressing as a woman at every opportunity. I captured 109 images and now have the painstaking task of selecting just the right images to use in my digital art project that will involve blending his body with fantasy imagery. I did something very different this time. Instead of isolating my model in my images, I added myself into the many of the images. This photographer-model interaction should open up opportunities for the viewer to see him or herself in the images.

Thursday, November 5, 2009
We had individual meetings today with Gabe to discuss our images for our next assignment, The Male Nude. Gabe loved my images of Jake and commended me for using the "superenergized setting of the hotel room." After the meetings, we went to The Slought Foundation where Barbara London, the video and media curator of MOMA, presented three short films that are part of the MOMA archives. Barbara cited the influences Nam Jun Paik's synthesized music videos had on David Bowie's "Space Oddity." She also showed H5's "Logorama," which was hilarious.

Saturday, November 7, 2009
I've been buying frames, cutting mat boards, and framing photographs for the past four weeks, so it's been crazy here in Kalinaland. Today, I picked up my boxmounts in Wilmington, Delaware. These things are huge. My largest image is Transsexual Women's Hands, an 81" x 30" image in three segments. Joe from Chesapeake Box Mounts did a fantastic job on my boxmounts. My friend Kristyn helped me transport everything. I had to give myself a crash course on how to hook and wire a frame, so thanks again to Kristyn and others who gave me valuable insights.

Sunday, November 8, 2009
Today I dropped off all of my artwork at the William Way Community Center. Most of the 31 images will be hung on the walls later today. The flyers for the gallery will be ready soon and the opening reception will be Friday, November 13, 2009. Candice, the gallery director, is very excited about my gallery, which is on display from November 9 to December 31, 2009.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Initial comments about my gallery are coming in. "I am so excited about the show and people are already saying how much they love it!" said Candice, the gallery director at the William Way Community Center. I'm not only the photographer of most of these images, but a performance artist as well. Kristyn was responsible for capturing the group images that show me in them as well as my introspective series. From an art perspective, the photography portion is one part of the overall process from scene to print as it truly is a hell of a lot of work to get all of the images lovingly massaged to museum quality standards. That includes cropping, resizing, adjusting tonal quality, printing several test images, printing the final image, mat board cutting, framing, wiring, cleaning, and cataloging. The art is in getting the final product to look consistent with the entire group of images and assembling all of the images into a worthy whole.

Thursday, November 12, 2009
Our Body and Photography class visited The Philomathean Society today to survey our gallery space for our opening reception on December 3 at 5pm to 7pm. It's a big space filled with possibilities. Gabe asked me to do a performance art segment for 30 minutes, complete with costume changes. I'll have to cut out a lot of excess carbs in my diet to get myself in good shape. The gallery is open to the public so, if you want to see my art work or performance, please come. My third assignment on the male body garnered rave reviews from the class. Some thought it was the most successful of my three projects because I really explored new territory in it. Ironically, it was the easiest project for me to do because I just had fun with it. Gabe selected six of the nine I printed of Jake, the model, to display on the gallery walls of the art school. One of them may appear on the flyer to promote the show at The Philomathean Society. I mentioned my "Clublife" gallery opening reception to my classmates, so hopefully some of them will come. We received our fourth assignment and it's due next Thursday! Looks like I dont have much time to look for a model, so I may use myself in this project. The project's goal is to explore extremes of the human body. I have a rough idea of doing micro to macro views of my body comparing nipple to breast to whole body.

Saturday, November 14, 2009
"Outstanding!" "awesome!" and "great!" were some of the superlatives used to describe my photo gallery at its opening reception at the William Way Community Center last night. I was happy to see both LGBT and non-LGBT guests in attendance and was especially happy that my photography professor, Gabriel Martinez, paid a visit. The importance of a gallery such as this cannot be denied because in all of photography absolutely noone with the exception of Nan Goldin has ever displayed a more substantial and relevant body of work focusing on a specific aspect of transgender life. It is not just a tribute to transgender women, but Philadelphia-based transgender women. Everyone was impressed with the boxmounted images and, among the smaller images, much praise went to my introspective images and the images of Lauren and Kristyn. Alec Soth, a Magnum photographer who visited my art school in April told a handful of us in a private critique, "Go with what you know." I took his advice to heart because that's how I've patterned my life. To the right, I'm standing next to the image he praised.

Sunday, November 15, 2009
I captured over 570 images during my photo session today. The images are for my fourth class assignment on extremes. I intend to compare and contrast how my body looked three to four years ago to the present.

Monday, November 16, 2009
I selected 52 of my favorite images from the 570+ images. Now I have to start thinking about what I want to do with these images and how to create a coherent project out of a subset of them. Gabe even said that because of the swift turnaround time, quick and impulsive choices need to be made. I have some wild ideas. Let's see if I could translate what's in my mind onto paper.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
My lightbulb went on overdrive this morning as I looked through my picture selections again. At first, I wanted to do dyptics, a very mundane, classical route, but then the idea of reflection hit me. Yes!!! I couldn't hold back my creativity at that point. I just worked on image after image nonstop. It was fun! I dug into my archives for more images and created some very visually striking work that will definitely raise some eyebrows. By early evening, I created 15 images that I'll probably whittle down to 14. I believe that with this type of work I should show more rather than less. • People have been telling me they love my gallery at the William Way Community Center. Someone wrote in my guestbook, "We are very fortunate to have a gallery as wonderful as this."

Thursday, November 19, 2009
I corrected one of my images this morning because I wanted to be consistent with my spider theme. Now I'm back to 15 images. • Today's Body and Photography class was seven-hours long. Erotic photographer Tony Ward presented his work from 3pm to 4:30pm and offered sage advice to our class based on his experience in the photography world. "It's my way of giving back to the community," he said. From 4:30pm to 5:30pm, Gabe gave us a tutorial on using the Flextight X5 scanner and its accompanying software. This $13,000 scanner will save me lots of money on scanning film, especially 4x5 large format films that normally cost $10 per scan. From 5:30pm to 7pm, we walked over to Meyerson Hall to see an Olaf Breuning talk. Olaf's an eclectic artist who uses a variety of mediums to poke fun of the absurdities of everyday life. From 7pm to 10pm, we had our critique for our fourth assignment on exploring extremes. We were given only a week to do the assignment, but I had a lot of fun creating 15 symmetric and spider images out of my body parts. The class thought the following two were the most successful and Gabe said that I have a "really rich body of work." Gabe told my classmates who haven't seen my "Clublife" show yet to go see it because "it's fantastic." My class' show at The Philomathean Society will be called "XXY: This is Not Pornography." I like the title's implicaton of androgyny. We're designing flyers for the show soon.

My friend, Kristyn, who captured my images for my first project, thought that I had used Photoshop to enlarge my breasts in my fourth project, but I showed her proof that this was not true by showing her the original images. "Losing six pounds from pneumonia can really shrivel up a body," I said to Kristyn, "especially mine, since I'm thin to begin with." My photography is usually very in-your-face when it comes to the face and body. When I showed my first project to my classmates, my body was not in an optimal state and it showed in the size of my breasts and waistline. My body was wasting away at the time and so I had to eat as much as possible to maintain my weight. My fourth project, besides being a fun project designed to fulfill course requirements, was a celebration of my body getting back to its former shape. If I couldn't get my body back into shape, I probably would've declined being the performance artist for next week's show at The Philomathean. Everything I do ties in with everything else.

Even with face and body modification (facial hair removal, eyebrow tweezing, breast enlargement through hormones), my classmates still read me as a boy and I'm fine with that if it makes them feel comfortable with me. Pushing the issue of my gender on anyone is fruitless and I feel that my body speaks for itself. I think it's obvious I should've been born a woman, so "she" is the proper pronoun for me, but I'll let these young adults figure it out for themselves over time. How would you classify an androgynous male-to-female transsexual? That's a tough one. Some would still say "he" and others would still say "she," but to most people, your gender is determined by your genitalia. My life has always been about oscillating between polar opposites, at first extreme oscillation, but gradually gravitating towards the exact center of the polar opposites. My work explores that concept, which for many is considered the unknown. All of my work this semester has been very bold and controversial and makes people think and perhaps squirm in their seats at the same time. Some of the most interesting photography has these qualities.

Friday, November 20, 2009
I've got my work cut out for me from here until December 10. I've been asked to prepare 16 of my images for the "XXY" show at The Philomathean Society on December 3, be on the flyer design committee to create a show flyer, and perform as one of the headline acts at the show where I'll be doing up to five costume changes and I'll need to be in top shape. Realistically, I should be able to prepare 11 or 12 images and do three costume changes at the show. The following week, December 10, our final portfolios are due and that includes at least 12 images representing the best of our four projects as well as at least 6 more images comprising a new project that relates to our entire work. Ack!

Sunday, November 22, 2009
I have a neat idea for the additional images in my final project. It occurred to me that the images could be captured during my performance at the "XXY" show! If I do it right, the images will look awesome. We have to give a two-minute presentation on our portfolio, which basically feels like an extended artist's statement that includes an artist's talk about who our influences are. For me, that's easy... Nan Goldin, Mariko Mori, Cindy Sherman, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Yesterday I printed all of the images I needed for my class' show at The Philomathean and today I prepared all of the mat boards for the 14x18 and 10x20 frames. I still need to prepare a matboard for an 18x24 frame and quite possibly another for a 12x24, but that presumes I can find a reasonably priced 12x24 frame. I think I'm almost getting the hang of mat board cutting. It seems that the harder I try to get the perfect edge, the less succesful I am, so I just did a "go with the flow" philosophy in this set of mat board cuts and everything went smoothly with no hassles.

Friday, November 27, 2009
I purchased all of the frames on Wednesday, matted all of my images on Thursday, and framed everything but the largest image today. Why does it always rain when I need to buy art supplies? Why isn't the art school open so I can cut my mat board? I have ten frames representing 12 images. My friend Cherise agreed to be a part of the performance event that I'm headlining at the show. She'll be dressed as Wonder Woman. The show is next week and this silly holiday called Thanksgiving probably messed with my weight goal.

Monday, November 30, 2009
I'm 129.6, a good weight for Thursday's performance. If I keep it up, I'll look rockin'. Photographer Tony Ward interviewed me and wrote about my "Clublife" show in his blog. There's still a lot of time left until the show ends on December 31, so be sure to check it out if you haven't already.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009
I've been printing images for my final project and working on a good presentation. My class and I were at the Philomathean Society this evening hanging up our pictures for tomorrow's show. I'm 129.4 yesterday and today. I think that's going to be as optimal as I can get right now. Twenty-something college kids don't want to see a fat fourty-year-old tranny. They want to see good stuff and I'm ready to deliver it. Gabe introduced me to Hasbrouck, one of the Philomathean Society members, today and referred to me by feminine pronouns. Very cool. Hersh gave me compelling reasons to take Gabe's photo installation course, so now I'm torn between that and portrait photography. I don't want to take two courses again just yet.

Friday, December 4, 2009
The "XXY: This is Not Pornography" show at the Philomathean Society was a great success. The turnout was massive with 160 confirmed guests and probably plenty more via word of mouth. Because of the subject matter, this was a show that generated a lot of excitement, but also a bit of reservation, as many people did not know what to expect. I started off looking very androgynous, very Robert Mapplethorpe a la Self Portrait, 1980, but gradually moved to outfits that would make Lady Gaga proud, including a sexy pink kimono, my ever-popular pink and black witchie outfit, and my red and black dom-geisha. My photographer was none other than Kristyn Nichols who presented herself as an androgynous Paparazzi member, complete with Fedora hat and press card, at the outset and gradually transformed herself into a designer clothes schoolgirl by the final act as part of a three-part performance I scripted called "The Pose and the Paparazzi." A review of the show made the front page of the school newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. Click on the image to the right to read the complete article.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009
I finished printing all of my images for my final project and am working on my presentation, which will be called "M2F." It will be about male-to-female transsexuality, androgyny, and genderfucking. Some of my images are wicked two-page spreads that will look totally awesome.

Thursday, December 10, 2009
Today in Body and Photography class Gabe showed us some highlights of his past work. His art spans over two decades of photography and installation work, some of which was shown in galleries and museums in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Gabe was the recipient of many awards, including the highly prestigious Pew Charitable Trust. He has explored many different topics from the modern to the classical, from the serious to the whimsical. His installation work especially intrigued me, especially the room within a room, and now I'm truly torn between choosing two very different classes, both with copious amounts of work. I can't possibly take both given my work and home schedule. Hmmm...

Monday, December 14, 2009
Today is the big day in Body and Photography class where we have to give our final presentations. I created a killer 74-slide PowerPoint presentation that talks about my three greatest influences in photography, especially in the context of the class. Gabe suggested I add another two-page spread to my portfolio, which I did, and I rearranged a few image pairings in the process to make the entire portfolio more cohesive. • Gabe liked my final presentation! My final presentation was called "Body, Gender, Me," in which I described, compared, and related my work to my three greatest influences in photography: Nan Goldin, Mariko Mori, and Robert Mapplethorpe. My work this semester must have had a profound effect on a number of my classmates because three of them in their final presentations referenced my work as a source of inspiration or ideas they used to fuel their work. Two other classmates went to see my "Clublife" show and said it was awesome. My final portfolio was called "M2F" and contained eighteen of my best images from the class plus ten more from my final project. Only one student looked terribly uncomfortable with my work, but she was the one who had problems showing herself nude in the first project. She gave a really knock-your-socks-off final presentation, scanned copies of her scrapbook pages complete with gorgeous nudes of herself melded into its pages. I remarked, "I remember in your first assignment you had a problem showing yourself nude, but here you went all out and I'm glad you did. You saved the best for last. This is totally awesome and wonderful. It's Iron Chef approved!" stamping my fist on my desk like a gavel. She smiled and thanked me. I'm a ham in class sometimes, but I always give my honest opinion. Gabe encouraged me to enter a couple of my most controversial images into the Undergraduate Juried Exhibition.