PEOPLE LIKE US - A LIVING ARCHIVE
People Like Us is a collaborative photography, text and audio project, exploring trans, non-binary and GNC (gender non-conforming) identities and experience from AFAB (assigned female at birth) perspectives. Click here to read a full statement about the project.
In development since 2017, the project embraces 58 people from a rich variety of backgrounds and gender diversity. Layered with individual and collective experience, it indulges in positive and joyful representation of these personalities.
It’s a photo-book - self published 12/2024 - currently available to buy here with plans to hit bookshops around the UK and a tour later this year.
It’s an audio archive - between 2022 and early 2024 we recorded participants reflecting back on their photographs, the themes we were discussing and what’s changed... Myself and project participant and composer Nneka Cummins have been working together making individual edits to go with some of the photographs like ‘talking pictures’, we incorporated some of these into the photo-book via a QR code and we plan to make a soundscape with multiple voices later this year.
It’s Gay Shame! Live performance photo-shoots at Duckie’s annual antidote to London Pride - 2021 and 2022 - Click here for more.
It’s a zine - commissioned by Shout Queer Arts Festival and self-published in 2020.
It’s a community - participants playing out the childhood dreams they never had - football / rugby shoot and get together 2021
It’s a collection of stories.
“I still think about my body hair. When I was invited into this photography project, one of the ideas was to play with the dark coarse body hair that covers me. Instead, I brought my dainty gold trimming scissors, sharing the practices that come with a body like mine, exposing the assumptions of a body like mine. I don’t like my hair. I tolerate it and the methods I use to reduce, remove and maintain it. Especially the hair that sits on my upper lip and between my brows I have tolerated (read: tortured) since girlhood. But there’s something about how I can focus on each individual black hair, and the attention to detail I give now that I can look at my body this closely, that does make it feel okay. It turns it into a ritual that’s mine.” Sabah 2019
“I only started using the term non-binary a few years ago, after top surgery. Kate Bornstein calls gender a playground. I love this. Now my body balances. Like a see-saw. I think these terms - masculine / feminine - are up for grabs. I feel more playful defining as non-binary. Feels calming. Clear. Hopeful even. I wish this term had been available when I was growing up. It would have saved me a lot of pain and misunderstanding. Now, I can step into it. Play a little. Thanks to all the trans & NB people that helped me on this path in, and, around surgery”. Libro 2020
“If I could define my gender with one word, it would simply be Badass.” Don One
“Boys Bleed. Period.” Chiyo
“I wanted to revel in the joy of self expression, as I finally got to wear clothes I loved and have them fit in the way I felt they should.” Aster