Jack Rossie

Mooning the Sun

Featured Portfolio

Essay by Kat Lang for PhotoForum, 06 October 2020

Jack Rossie (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist currently completing a Bachelor of Design with Honours majoring in photography at Massey University. Rossie's work, often introspective, consistently circles queer images and expression, the entanglement of gender and the body, also, art as a vehicle for reclamation and celebration. Their practice is fed by their relationship to themself and those closest to them. They’ve described this as working ‘from themself, outwards’.

Queer presence and the clap of a photograph fall into one another like lovers. The essence of each other attempting to exist, to be imaged, collides. We all lived together for an approximate period of two years. Myself, Jack, Nat, Tobias, George and Miguel. My friend, and former flatmate, Jack, gifted me images of myself from angles I would not have been able to see without them. These images depicting the materiality of all our experiences, Jack has made into a photobook - Mooning the Sun. All individuals find and image themselves in refractions and glimpses from others. It is difficult when those mirrors are few and warped through cisnormative and queerphobic hegemony. Such as why the connection we had with each other and Jack’s lens to capture ourselves was incredibly special. I hold these images and my friends firmly in my heart. In this piece of writing, I hope to explore the importance of friendship, the nature of memory, and a transient body.

It’s important to note that this writing piece by no means speaks for ‘the queer community’, nor will I be able to effectively capture each of my flatmate’s experiences. I only wish to capture an essence of what was felt, and what continues to be felt, when my prior flatmates and I experience these photos of ourselves.

The truth is, and I’m speaking directly for myself here, is that I am horrified at the sight of my body. Very deeply and for a long time. I seek refuge in an imagined or artful interpretation of the space I take up rather than the limits of flesh. In these images, that instinct is softened. Because I know Jack photographed me with love, and because they see me as beautiful. There is something to be said for the moment when a photograph is made as to whether it is taken or given. These photographs were never taken from us. Throughout Jack making this photobook, the need to hold agency over our self-image was, and still is, respected. These photos are collaborative. These photos are a specific sort of gift. See, it is rare to see yourself in moments when your ‘self’ is relentlessly leaking out of you. In this way, these photographs are abject.

In the context of our home we had a common understanding that did not need to be explained. There was a specific comfort in that we were all going through our own challenges, some shared, some private. The comfort was in not having to dissuade nor be dishonest about that. We lent on each other, we got too close, and for better or worse we bled into each other. The abject self is one who exists inside-out. To abject is to expel one's insides, whether that is sweat, cum, piss, or blood. Abject horror is seeing your insides fall out of you. Beauty is that which is confrontational.

At that period in time, we knew that our placement was very much where we needed to be. As six intense people with a shared comradery of queerness, we managed to create a moment in time in which we learned immensely from our normalisation of queer socialisation. We formed a deep forgiveness and a permission for feeling and expressing our experience in full. We created an environment in which we were able to hold mirrors up to each other at angles that were as deeply horrifying as they were enriching. That's how I view this book. Looking into Jack's camera was as if looking them dead in the eye and their sight refracted back. There is a deep significance in creating your own hegemony. This hegemony was one of our selves, our truths, away from the scrutiny of a simplified “real-world” that queer history has always shadowed. We were able to govern our space to suit our ideology and move through that as we pleased. I am anti-simplicity. Simplicity will always cut out in order to focus. I think a focus can be expanding, and I no longer will have the narrative my body holds cut in the name of simplicity for I am still bleeding.

This photographic pursuit exists within the context of the digital era, and at the nexus point of new materialisms. New materialism being that which acknowledges our material beingness in materialist tradition, then moves past simple categorisation to account for the intricacy of interaction with the material world in context of our humanness and nature of being. Every photograph in this series is shot on 35mm film. There is a false nostalgia that exists for a bygone era of clear and simple relations between photography, human observers and a “real-world” that never existed. This is usually in reference to the seemingly simple transfer of real world light burned into film. It is a literal ‘capture reality’ as if that camera ever was a passive and rational observer - this is an unhelpful and false simplification of the necessarily eventful and metaphysical act of capturing and constructing an image.

In Katharina Fackler’s Of Stereoscopes and Instagram: Materiality, Affect and the Senses from Analog to Digital Photography, Fackler talks extensively to this false nostalgia, driving home the notion of new-materiality in context of photography’s ever present elusiveness towards the material of which evades such simple definition. Photography since its conception has had an intimate relationship with materiality. This relationship is rather queer, convoluted even. This has come under scrutiny under the digital era, as if the digital has ‘dematerialised’ the photograph. The assumption here is the seeming lack of materiality that the digital proposes. Rather, as Fackler points out, this relationship still very much exists, and in a new form. What the digital era points out is the inherent ‘falseness’ of the photograph. A photograph was always a lie, to some degree. Perhaps not a lie, but a post-truth. Our wishes and image making demands are forms of truth. Our truths. We enter a period of post-truth.

Ocularcentrism is a tradition which demands the real as tied inextricably to sight. This demands a simplification of sight as that which pertains to truth. In turn, this sight-truth tends to “solidify the position of the privileged” (Fackler, p. 520). This privilege is that which is ‘true’ to the hegemony it exists within. Sight upon trans bodies is generally scrutiny, an act of searching for the truth the viewer believes in. For this I’m thankful for the agency I had over these images. Sight is a sense, one which mediates rather than dictates. “Materiality is never defined as stable, pre-defined, or purely physical, but always coming into being through sensory contact with a perceiving subject” (Fackler, p. 520). There is no truth in a photo, only the suggestion of truth, or truth-making. The viewer is never passive, nor is the subject nor photographer. Each being is an active participant in the truth-making process of images. In this way, images such as ours are ever-becoming and transforming - particularly when my friends and I look back upon ourselves.

Photography by nature of both form and function is inextricable from conversations around memory and time. I particularly feel the need to reflect on reflection, as at the time of writing, the ‘self’ of ours, these selves, that exist in these pages no longer exist. Time is a construct of a consciousness that retains and anticipates the present, as no longer or not yet, where past and present cannot. (1. Heathcote) “Memories do their work by refusing the discrete borders of sequential ‘moments’ and by collapsing the past and the future into present.” (2 Castalgia, Reed). Queers have always had intimate relationships with that which holds a transient nature of being. I think that is why queer photography is usually beautiful. An expression of genderful and sexual transience from straight hegemony is captured at an expanding close. A photograph. Experiencing photographs collapses linear time. Memory is located at a point of tension, between the possible and the actual, much akin to trans bodies. Our bodies.

For some of us, this period of time was our first positive erotic queer experiences. In memory, there is an agency and a power. In the present of these photos the tension of that memory is in being able to remember and articulate through visual images a positive eroticism and the sharing of transient bodies. Such as film is a physical imprint of reality, our bodies become an imprint of memory. There are imprints of us, blood, force and spirit in the decaying yellow plasterboard you can see in Jack’s photographs. There is a tension in this moment, as to forget is to lose the accumulation of sensation (3 Warth). Our consciousness passes through time, linked arms with our bodies passing through space beyond the moment of memory. For now we are able to revisit very intimately, George still occupies that space and all those stairs welcome us back with open mildew arms. “Photography creates a cross-temporal dialogue that allows moments to exist outside of linear time, to haunt the future.” (4 Warth). The sensations we felt will continue their life in our flesh, and in this ideologically queered physical and non-physical space.

Personhood is never fully realised, not even moments before death. We are only gifted a sense of permanence, memories collapsed in time. These are places to jump off, and look backwards too.

In talking about this writing piece, we’ve all mentioned the significance of this period of time. This period being a place of intense growth. It is difficult to talk of ‘coming of age’ and ‘chosen families’ when the narrative of this depends upon and adheres to the heterosexual and the cisgender. There’s a reason why film and media about coming of age is so widespread, it is this desperation for a sense of meaning and finality - of which there isn’t any. Rather, there is a constantness to these periods. I am fuller from the love this family has given me, and these images will haunt me as I haunt them. The time held in them will continue to be a moment I bring into focus in past, in present, in future. We all will.

Kat Lang (they/them) is a practicing artist currently working in Te Whanganui-A-Tara and currently completing an honours degree in Fine Art at Massey University. At the core of their practice is an intent to work towards understanding uncomfortability in queer bodies, that relationship to power and constructing queer, anti-capitalist space. Their art making has involved writing, new-media, taxidermy, music and event curation.

Footnotes

1) Heathcote, Owen. Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol by Nicholas de Villiers (review)’

2) Castalgia, Reed. If Memory Serves

3) Warth, Kevin. If I Could Turn Back Time: AIDS, Photography, and Queer Temporality

4) Ibid

This featured portfolio was made possible by funding from Creative New Zealand