I am extremely excited to present a GAQ feature interview and photo spread with incredible photographer and artist, Sophia Wallace. Wallace merges narrative, documentary, fashion, and performance strategies to create dialogue around notions of gender and identity. And it’s beautiful work. Perhaps the most striking thing about Wallace’s work for me is her ability to create imagery as crisp and fashion-forward as those in your latest issue of Vogue, while simultaneously offering cultural commentary and bringing thought provoking themes to the fore.
I asked Wallace some questions about her work, her process and the ideas behind it all. Click the photo for the entire spread, or click HERE to download.
this music video is really Important because:
a. women reclaiming public space/space where harassment occurs
b. reappropriation of physical harassment thru the use of handprint imagery
c. reappropriation of masculine object (baseball bat) for self-defense by women
d. men shown performing physical labor as work/women shown performing physical labor for pleasure
e. deconstruction of ageism thru the inclusion of young & elderly women being complete badasses
f. centering around performance by women of color, which is refreshing when we as a culture just had to deal with the fucking white girl mafia
g. doooooope. beat. not going to pretend i don’t love this song (or rye rye in general)
“thugged-out hustlers who were ‘new’ to gay culture, butch lesbians with erotic attachments to gay men, bootleg black designers and fashionistas eager to put their garments ‘to test’ in a new urban scene.”
Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City
“There is an essential quality of goodness, of naturalness, and of fearlessness, woven into these archetypal stories; a quality we, as viewers, are compelled to identify with through a feeling of nostalgia … What happens when the subject within a scene of childhood innocence has an ambiguous gender? Does this disrupt the intrinsic wholesomeness of the image? When gender fluidity is taken out of an over-determined sexual context and placed in this conceptual framework, can it take on the same qualities of naturalness ascribed to boyhood?”
