This post was submitted by adam

J. Aiden Simon is aBaltimore-based photographer that recently premiered his newest exhibit “Member” at the D.C. Center that will be up throughout July. TNG got the chance to pick the brain of a talented photographer to see what and who inspires him, his models, his personal experiences, and his upcoming projects.

The New Gay: How did your personal experiences with masculinity and gender identity issues affect or empower your art?

J. Aiden Simon: Well I guess I would say that when I began transitioning at 18, there were a lot of questions about masculinity I couldn’t find the answers for because no one really talks about men’s issues, especially not men. Art has always been a way to discover what’s going on inside of myself and with other people. So I used my photography as a way to start a dialogue with other people about what it means to be a man, and how they interact with the world as a man, and I guess in a way that I couldn’t verbally. It’s allowed people to approach that subject in a way that I don’t think they would have approached personally otherwise.

TNG: What inspired you to create this exhibit specifically?

JAS: I guess I feel like there is a lack of space for different types of men and there is such a narrow expectation of what it means to be a man.  The exhibit was born out of my frustration of trying to deal with that both as a person who’s trans and an artist and Jewish and anything else having to do with how people read me as a body. And I felt like the only photography of and by trans people were very limiting bodies of work that were just trying to show that we are human. Art can do so much more than that and as people we can do so much more than that. It got to the point that I wanted to step outside that and say “Well, what are other people seeing and what do I want other people to see when they see trans people?” And realizing that you can’t necessary call someone a transsexual just because they are shorter, (or other factors) that’s not always the case. So I wanted to represent that visually and bring something to the table that wasn’t there in photography already.

TNG: Has gender identity and sexual orientation always been at the forefront of your work?

JAS: Yes, but I didn’t always know it. When I was in high school, I started becoming serious as a photographer. And the most important teacher I had started pushing me toward self-portraiture and that’s on my website. It’s a small black and white. I started photographing myself without the realization at the time that I was dealing with my gender identity. I was really just trying to figure out how to manipulate my body and rearrange my body so that it would work in the environments I was setting up and the compositions I was imagining. And I started talking to a curator about my work in the context of feminist art and it didn’t really fit for me. That was at a point before I could really deal with my own gender identity. I could see the inner struggle that was going on in my photography. There are some other things I do with my photography that are based around gender identity. Sometimes I’m looking at how we remake our memories through family snapshots and the way photography affects our memory. Some of that work is also on my website.

TNG: Where did you find your models for your exhibit?

JAS: Umm, I guess the only thing that I am willing to say about that is that they are all friends of mine and I’m always looking for more models [laughs].

TNG: How did they first react to you asking them to pose with their hands in front of their genitals?

JAS: Do you mean before they were photographed or after?

TNG: Both, actually.

JAS: It really depended on the person. Some people came up to me and asked to be part of the project. There are other people that I sought out specifically for their body types. I really wanted the work to show different types of bodies. Some of them were really hesitant, but some of the models came together as a group and did the “I’ll go first, you go second” type of thing. Being photographed was a little bit different also for each person, because it is a quick process, with very little set up for a changing area on the side. Most people came out with their hands in front of their waist and walked out onto the backdrop and it would be a pretty quick set of the shot, and an “Are you ready?” “I’m ready.” There would be a lot of talking before and afterward about what it means for that person to be a man and how they feel about their body. There was only one person who was a little bit ambivalent about the work going up in D.C., because he knows a few people in D.C. At the time that we were discussing it, I had work up at my school, so I invited him to see it. When he saw the photograph itself and in the context of the photography, next to the nine other men, he felt much more comfortable, because it wasn’t just his body on display, but the bodies of a group of men.

TNG: What are some stereotypes you try to dispel in your art?

JAS: Specifically in this project, I’m trying to dispel the stereotypes around men’s bodies. I think as a transman, and as somebody who is involved in the LGBT community at my school, I’ve seen this play out with younger people who are transitioning at my school. I’m trying to educate people about the fact that your body doesn’t have to born with a penis of a certain size or white or taller or any of these things that I feel pressure or I know other people feel pressure to be. I want the world to be a more open place for other people than I found it to be for myself. I think that transitioning and being around people in the LGBT community has taught me to broadened my horizons of what it means to be a man. And to try to talk with other men about that, like what does it mean to be a man who wears a pink shirt? What does it mean to be a man who rides a motorcycle? My role as a photographer is to watch people and their body language and I’m privileged to sit back and watch people and make observations from my own standpoint. And examine what it means to be a man. I’m in a class right now called “Gender and Everyday Life” and there is this great article called “Masculinity as Homophobia” that stuck me as incredibly accurate. It talked about how men’s biggest fear is other men and being humiliated in front of other men. The biggest thing for me is coming from the perspective of feeling inadequate as a man, then coming to the realization that these aresn’t just feelings that transpeople have, they’re issues all men have and nobody really talks about. You can be a man and also be afraid to be humiliated. As a man, it isn’t socially acceptable to admit you have these fears or any fears at all. So I think I had the privilege of dealing with all this adolescent man stuff at a later age and I was able to sit back and analyze what was going on in my own mind and be able to critique what was going on instead of at 13 years old when I didn’t understand the world so much. I just wish men talked about men’s issues more often and that’s something I struggle with myself.

TNG: Do you think homosexuals themselves perpetuate these stereotypes?

JAS: No, I don’t. And I think that’s a really great question. I think that we need to be more accepting of any men regardless of how stereotypically masculine or stereotypically feminine they are. And anyone whether they are gay or straight should be allowed to act in a “homosexual” way.

TNG: Are there any artists, past or present, that inspire you?

JAS: Absolutely. I’m inspired by Mary Coble, who is a D.C. based performance artist, who does radical stuff with her body. She gets tattoos of first names of LGBT people who have been murdered, and a lot derogatory names written on her body. She’s crazy in the best possible way. She was teaching basic photo at my school this year and had really great impact on the basic photo students. Her work was fantastic. Charlie White is doing some really great work on gender right now. He is doing some work on adolescent girls and transsexual women and finding girls and women that look similar and photographing them together which is a great way to talk about beauty, femininity, and adolescence specifically and what it means to be going through puberty.

TNG: Do you have any more projects coming up?

JAS: Yes, but I can not tell you about them right now, because they are just on paper right now. It will probably be about men and pregnancy and more stuff about being a man and masculinity.

---

First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...

---