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Isolation played into my project in more ways than one. I was able to utilize the social distancing and isolation to create images that felt very empty and lonely. I looked to natural, wide open environments to create my images. I intentionally stayed away from urban environments as I felt that they would give less of a desolate atmosphere. The few man-made structures in my photos are somewhat dilapidated and abandoned.

I was against using myself as a subject at the start of my project. My intent was to give voices to LGBTQ+ people beyond myself, and I didn't know how I could do that when I wasn't able to photograph other people. However, it was April 2020 and quarantine was in full effect, so in the interest of keeping people safe I chose self-portraiture.

A core piece of my project is the fact that the subject (myself) is photographed from very far away, in order to give more of a sense of isolation. I also realized that if I took the pictures from very far away it had the added effect of obscuring my face to an extent. For a while I had struggled to find a way to do self-portraiture without it being self-centered. In other words, I would be the subject of my photos, but I didn't want them to be portraits of myself. Taking them from far away lended anonymity and obscurity to my pictures to achieve this.

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My capstone project has been a rollercoaster of a process. The form this photo essay has taken is not what I thought it would be back in September of last year, or even February of this year.

What I love most about the LGBTQ+ movement is the diversity and celebration of identity. The labels that come with LGBTQ+ respectively can be limiting and to an extent trivializing, because gender and sexuality is such a wonderfully freeform part of the self. In this photo essay, I aimed to explore this part of my identity and the community which I hold dear.

I interviewed several members of the LGBTQ+ community during my project. Through this, I found that there is such a range of identity and voices beyond my own, and I hoped to capture that through my images. Besides this, I realize that I am coming into this project from a point of privilege. I wanted this essay to be a platform for members of the community whose voices are often drowned out by those who have more privilege. I wanted this to be a platform for women, POC, and non-binary individuals to be represented. I wanted to take portraits of LGBTQ+ individuals between the ages of 13 and 19, and give a little window into their identities through their clothes, their families, and the spaces they create, and do my shooting over spring break. In other words, my project involved me going into the homes of a bunch of people in the middle of March 2020. This turned out to be a mistake. So, I changed my viewpoint and created a new project.

I decided to focus on a different theme I found in my interviews, which was a feeling of isolation and abjection found by many LGBTQ+ youth. What I heard in my interviews were feelings of marginalization, and many who are not able to express their identity to their community due to prejudice, especially within the POC and non-binary communities. So I created a series of portraits exploring this theme.