A photographer shows the beauty of their transition through vivid self-portraits

Several months after photographer Laurence Philomène started testosterone hormone remedy as half of their transition, they started to take photos of themselves at residence. This was in 2018, and Philomène, was involved about burnout, so that they took two months off from work to deal with self-care.

Establishing a portrait follow turned half of their every day routine: They photographed themselves making breakfast or brushing their tooth; they took nude self-portraits towards their residence’s child blue partitions or whereas sporting a fairytale princess robe in mattress. All these photos are made extra vibrant by the presence of Philomène’s signature neon orange hair.

What started as a easy impulse to chronicle a interval of bodily and psychological change has change into an archive of hundreds of photos and now a forthcoming e-book, “Puberty,” set to be launched this summer time.

The artist started the collection whereas dealing with intense emotions of burnout. “I was in a place where I had been prioritizing other people’s needs and I really needed to relearn how to take basic care of myself,” they stated. Credit: Laurence Philomene

“Puberty” captures all the intimate particulars of every day life in lush shade, and the photographer typically interrupts the mundane with the surprising. Philomène sits in the lilac-tinted water of a bath, eyes downcast, sipping from a mug. They recline on a sofa like Ingres’ well-known Nineteenth-century portray of a concubine, “Grande Odalisque,” gazing over their shoulder at the digicam. In one picture, their hand holds a peach in the dappled morning gentle; in one other body, echoing that composition, they maintain a medical syringe with hormones above an overturned plush Care Bear.

Laurence Philomene

On one degree these pictures are about the photographer’s private expertise of transitioning. At the similar time, Philomène’s photos seize what has change into a globalized human expertise, as the difficulties of self-care at residence and the pressures of productiveness have grown extra related throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

“(Puberty) is about my transition, but it’s also just these themes that resonate really deeply with being a human in the 21st century,” stated Philomène in a video interview from their residence in Montreal.

The beauty of fluidity

In the mid-2010s, as celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have been touchdown journal covers, Philomène noticed how trans beauty was being framed in a particular method.

“I felt like a lot of it was very much focused on this idea of passing as your gender and transitioning in a very binary sense,” the artist stated. “That really wasn’t representative of the trans community that I was a part of, which was a lot more fluid.”

Philomène started spending alone time taking baths throughout quarantine. Many of the themes they discover in “Puberty” turned much more common throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Credit: Laurence Philomene

Philomène is non-binary and sees images as “a space where you can play around with gender,” they stated. Much of their work has centered on studio portraits and documentary-style photos of gender nonconforming youth, although self-portraits have at all times been half of their follow. In the 2019 collection “Huldufólk,” they seem nude, embedded in numerous desolate landscapes in Iceland, as a method to evoke the nation’s folks historical past of elves, referred to as “hidden people,” and examine the ever-shifting terrain to a human physique in perpetual change.

In “Me vs Others,” a collection they shot from 2014-2019, they solid folks of completely different genders and ethnicities to play themselves, every sporting a wig to imagine Philomène’s identification. The staged portraits of the doppelgangers are sometimes tongue-in-cheek, with objects like oranges and Cheetos changing into symbols for the artist as effectively.

“Puberty” additionally incudes nonetheless lifes of the ephemera of the residence, portray a extra full image of what the artist sees on daily basis. Credit: Laurence Philomene

Now is their late 20s, Philomene grew up throughout the mid 2000s, and as a young person was simply as influenced by the picture sharing platform Flickr as they have been by Wolfgang Tillmans’s effervescent snapshots of youth tradition, or Nan Goldin’s diaristic depictions of intimacy.

“I just have a lot of nostalgia for (the Flickr era), because (social media) wasn’t fully formed in the way that it is with capitalism now,” Philomène stated. “I wasn’t trying to sell anything. When I was 14 posting on Flickr we were just trying to make cute pictures.”

Philomène was recognized with a persistent sickness when nonetheless a toddler, and at age 11, they started dyeing their hair to claim a way of management over their physique, the artist recalled. Living with an sickness for a lot of their life has significantly knowledgeable their work at the moment, they stated — a sentiment that resonates with some of its main themes: how one cares for their physique, and the way one’s sense of self is greater than their look.

“Representation is not the end all be all,” the artist stated. “My goal at the end of the day isn’t just to represent a trans life, but to really…create a sense of connection.” Credit: Laurence Philomene

“Lately, my sense of self is expanding beyond the physical body,” the artist stated. “(I’ve been) thinking of myself as a being having a human experience and wanting to communicate what that feels like outside of what I look like.”

Philomène hopes to faucet into some of the experiences human beings share, and encourage self-reflection. “(I want to) inspire people to see beauty in their day-to-day lives,” they stated. “Because that’s really what the project is all about at the end of the day.”