Bryson Rand on PJ, Jim, & Greg

PJ, Jim, & Greg was made soon after I had finished graduate school. During school, I was making work that focused on my personal relationship to the history of HIV/AIDS within Queer communities. Making that work was a way for me to mourn the loss of the thousands of people who lost their lives to the epidemic and attempting to understand how this loss and the cultural and political events surrounding the epidemic continue to impact me and my community.

Upon leaving school I felt like I had made it through some sort of struggle and was being set free in a way. While this feeling was in some ways liberating, in other ways it was terrifying. So in much of the work I made for the two years after school I was attempting to give visual form to these seemingly contradictory feelings: freedom and uncertainty. One of the ways I accomplished this was by placing the bodies I was photographing in spaces that were stripped of signifiers, as I the people in the photos were between worlds or in the process of creating a new one. In this new world logic and the rules of gravity didn’t apply. Bodies could float or be suspended in improbable movement.

In this image, the middle figure seems to be on the verge of levitating or gently coming back down. The tension in the three pairs of legs show the life force and energy that our bodies hold. The decision to only show the men from the waist down is mostly because I was so drawn to the physicality of their legs. I also am interested in how an image that does not show a person’s face can be read or understood. In life when we are interacting with people, and sometimes in the most intimate of interactions, we don’t always see their faces and I try to reflect that in my work.

I was thinking about this work the other day and I realize that it represents a sort of post-mourning. In my experience people talk about mourning as having a clear stopping point, but after the most intense part of the mourning is over, there is a whole other range of emotions and obstacles to deal with. This is not to say that there is no joy in my work from this time but it is tainted with a sense of heading into the unknown. One of the men in this image is an old friend of mine and the other two are men I was put in touch with by a friend when I was traveling to Minneapolis for a wedding, and the shot was made in a trapeze/acrobat school of all places. Many of the pictures I made that day are of the men hanging from various apparatus in the studio and was a really exciting way for me to explore ideas of floating/suspension.

Bryson Rand (January, 2018)