Stunning - magazine

STUNNING

APRIL 2019

VOL. 1, NO. 1

KNOW BEHIND LELAND BOBBEE GENDER-BENDING PHOTO SERIES

HOW BEING IN DRAG HELPED SASHA VELOUR WITH REALITY

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WIGS AND GRACE Visit at www.wigsandgrace.com

CONTENTS Half Drag

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How the fantasy of drag helps Sasha Velour deal with reality

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APRIL 2019

HALF DRAG

Photographing New York City’s drag queens at intersection of their identities The premise of Half Drag is simple.

Photographer Leland Bobbé’s striking, genderbending photo series captures New York City drag queens with half of their faces done up in full regalia, the other half au naturel. The result, achieved without any digital effects, is a collection of portraits that put the visual iconography of gender into striking juxtaposition.

There is also a harmony, a wholeness within each split image. In each side, one naturally sees echoes of the other. The traction between the two poles of gender expression suggests that gender itself is anything but either/or. That’s not to say that the two sides in these images aren’t very distinct.

Indeed, Bobbé suggests holding up a card (or just your hand) to cover one side of each image at a time. The contrast is startling. “People have told me that the male sides in these photos seem vulnerable, the female side with the makeup and jewelry are so powerful,” he says.

The queens in these photos don’t usually step into town or onto a stage until their metamorphosis is complete. The makeup, jewelry and wardrobe provide the foundation for a complete identity after all. So for some in this series, going half-way was a real challenge.

“A lot of them said they didn’t know what to feel, half-male or half-female,” Bobbé says.

“When I shot, I directed them as if they were female, and the male side just came along for the ride.”

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The series represents an intersection of Bobbe’s experience as a fashion photographer in the 80s, and his growing passion for personal portraiture.

“Having the eye for eye makeup and lips, making sure everything is perfect, blowing hair, knowing how to direct the hand by the face, directing a certain response to the camera, all that was helpful,” he says. “They know how to put it on for the camera. The challenge was also not to put it on too much. I wanted to make sure the pictures weren’t too campy, but more of a serious, seductive portrait.”

The project got rolling in November of 2011, after Bobbé did an experimental shoot with a queen he met at an industry party. After the first subject shared their photo on Facebook, Bobbé began noticing the other drag queens in their photo stream. He immediately saw subjects that would make great candidates for the series, and started reaching out to propose a shoot. “Pretty much 100 percent of them said yes.”

The models he photographed came into the studio wearing regular clothes, with several days of facial growth. They then shaved half their faces, and prepared their own hair and makeup. The hair proved to be the hardest part of the process.

“One came in and cut the wig down the middle,” Bobbé says. “Stray hairs would get over to the male side, that’s why the images are all cropped into the forehead, on top of the head are a lot of pins holding everything in place.”

Bridging a gendered divide Bobbé has no immediate plans to continue Half Drag. But he says that the project has afforded him a deeper understanding of gender expression, and those who live outside of its mainstream.

“I got a lot emails from transgender people, young people facing the difficulties of coming out, who tell me how important these have been because of how supportive they are,” he says.

“These are photos of a group of people who are sometimes looked down upon, or seen as outsiders of society. But the way I wanted to handle it was dignified, respectful and elegant.”

Today, non-binary and gender-nonconforming people are specifically targeted by society and government. From the presidential decree banning transgender people from the military, to the justice department arguing that civil rights protections don’t apply to homosexuals, to the historically high targeting for violence, gender nonconformity comes with real risks.

Striking, even disconcerting representations of the many shades between male and female — not to mention the many things those two words themselves can mean — help add necessary shading to our understanding of gender and its many expressions.

Fabulous though these images are, they might be challenging for some. They defy us to make sense of two roles and identities that our society has conditioned us to consider as being sharply distinct, even incompatible. But viewers of all persuasions may well relate to these images more than they suspect. As RuPaul has said, “You’re born naked — the rest is drag.”

Representation matters immensely for marginalized communities. The reason can be felt even by those viewers who are not part of these communities: in the tension, confusion, or fascination they might feel when sitting with images like these. That is the feeling of scratching at preconceptions or misapprehensions. And any photo that can confront viewers with unfamiliar complexity, or demystify an ‘other’, is worth looking at a little longer.

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How the fantasy of drag helps Sasha Velour deal with reality For Sasha Velour, all roads led to drag.

Redefining classic songs through lip-sync

Being a Fulbright scholar, Vassar grad, graphic artist, and illustrator were all primers for the trailblazing work she does now as a performer, public speaker, and advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community. But even after winning season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, landing brand ambassador deals, and selling out shows, Velour is still riddled with creative self-doubt.

“We could take ‘The Man that Got Away’ as a good example. It’s a classic Judy Garland song.

I started just by studying her performance in the movie A Star is Born. I felt like she actually was signaling different levels of openness with where she put her head or where she put her arms. So I started channeling some of those movements, but then I wanted to tell a different story—not about necessarily a broken heart in a romance. So many songs are about heterosexual romance. And I like, in my performances, to make it about anything but that. When I heard the song, this story came to my mind of someone who feels like their life is falling apart because this authority figure in their life has gone. And then they realize in the process of tearing their hair out over it that they actually have the thing that they were looking for within themselves.

That’s more of the kind of story I want to tell on stage than just ‘You left me, and now my life is over.’ All I have to work with is the text and the music, which don’t change. But I can make changes through my costume, through my face, through my movements on the stage. I felt like transforming into this men’s shirt and tie and hat that’s been hiding within her costume this whole time was the clearest way I had of telling that story.”

“I’ve been trying to really lean in to the fantasy of drag. It does carry with it some level of delusion and that is like an artistic indulgence– that’s very helpful to survive the world,” Velour says in the latest episode of Fast Company‘s podcast Creative Conversation. “And I feel like I can replicate that process in my own mental health a little and be like, ‘No, you are fabulous.’

Putting on a steel-boned corset and 10-inch platforms, it’s hard not to look in the mirror and hold yourself a little higher and feel that you really are royalty.”

Even before being crowned America’s next drag superstar, Velour has been using her monthly Brooklyn drag revue, Nightgowns, as a way to showcase the breadth of the art form expressed by performers across racial, gender, and sexual spectrums. Since its premiere in 2015, Nightgowns has grown from a handful of audience members to packing New York City’s concert venue Terminal 5 (where Janet Jackson was reported in attendance) as well as expanding to Los Angeles and London. As popular as Nightgowns has been, Velour had never produced a solo show until January when she debuted Smoke & Mirrors in Australia. She’s now bringing her one-woman show to New York City later this month.

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Finding truth through Smoke & Mirrors

Velour’s most important creative lesson

“I don’t have the words to talk about the most personal things in my life, and lip-synching performances are used for that. But a lip-sync performance is only, maximum, maybe seven or eight minutes if you really stretch it out. And by nature they have a very simple narrative structure where there’s a beginning, and then a conflict or some growth, and then a dramatic resolution or reveal. And I felt like that was a little too simple to talk about the ideas that I wanted to talk about.

“I reflect on the things that fill in my life. And I obviously feel so passionate about drag that I regularly stay up all night, tear my hair out, so to speak, basically invest all of my money and time into doing my best at this thing that I love.

I feel like everyone should have something in their lives that makes them behave in such an extra manner–to go to such extra lengths that they really are beyond normal life when it comes to this thing. And I feel like that has sustained me through hardships and uncertainty, my passion for the thing that I love. Everyone needs to figure out what that is for themselves.”

I wanted to create a show about the ups and downs of the last couple of years. And in order to do that, I felt like I needed to have many different moments back-to-back that chartered the exquisite reveals and discoveries, and also the sad moments that don’t lead to resolution.

And then ultimately the whole thing is just a cycle–just like all human life, really. There are highs and there are lows. They’re transcendent reveals and there are moments of stillness.”

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