These are a set of photographs, that need to be viewed together as a photo story. They serve to act as a conduit, between the eye of the voyeur and the measured eye of the photographer. This is an observation in looking, at someone else, looking at themselves.
There is an ambiguity, a tension, and a sense of a pause. That framed moment. A veil of steam, a curtain of light, the door slightly ajar. These are the moments of the just before.
It's a private yet public moment. It invites you to look, but it's still controlled, there is still a veil, a mist, a wetness, a smudge of frailty that reveals it's humanity. In this bathroom, my private space. Where I look at myself, and I record it. The mirror, the lens, the door, the curtain. It's a charade. It's a performance. But who is she performing for? But it's real all right, even thought she's barely visible, she's a mirage of the steamy shower sex scenes that never come to fruition. It isn't a voyeurs lens. It's my own.
For me this work is about how I see my queerness; and in examining myself, I finally have control over how others see me. When in so many instances people never view you as how you see yourself.
This photo story steps toward confronting my own intersectionality, between race, gender, and sexuality and disability... My own queerness enables me to transcend these layers and hold my own identity within my hands, in a way that makes sense to me, after all the years, it makes sense now... I cannot call myself any other name than queer, because my identity confronts each and every other facet in a contradiction. I am visible, yet invisible, here nor there. Hidden and revealed. People choose to see parts of me first that I have no control over. It is what you cannot see, just beyond the door, out of frame in the mirror, I wish to draw attentention to. South Asian, Queer Woman, Brown Femme, my disabled body that is invisible to most.. what is she? I am blurred and suspended between the trajectories of heterosexual and queer, Asian and Western, looking able bodied and being disabled....the pause and suspension between those pivotal points. It is this I seek to capture.
Images belong to Raisa Kabir.
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