interests, and we decided to join forces and create this project together. It’s a collection of portraits and interviews with people who are transgender and gender nonconforming and over the age of fifty. I had never worked specifically with older adults before, and she had never interacted with photography in this way, so it was a unique melding of our backgrounds. June Paul How did you make contact with so many different people across the country for To Survive on This Shore? JTD The very first two portraits, taken in 2013, were of Grace and Chris in Boston, who I had known from my time living and working there. And then we connected with some people that Vanessa knew from her work in Chicago. Then the project spread by word of mouth. From the very beginning, we were committed to seeking out diversity in the people that we included. We sought diversity in terms of age, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, socioeconomic status, geographic location, and life narrative. For two or three years, we worked on the project slowly. By 2015, we had made about twenty to thirty portraits and interviews. I created a website for the project, we got some press, and the work was featured in the New York Times. After that, I got hundreds of emails from people all over the country wanting to participate, wanting to bring me to their towns; people were suddenly aware of the work on a national scale. Another way we found people was by attending the Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference and the Gender Odyssey Conference in Seattle. I presented the work and found people to photograph there. We also relied heavily on person-to-person trust and word of mouth, particularly within portions of the community that we are less part of—people of color, people who live in rural places. As a photographer, I do a lot of lectures at universities and also have exhibitions, and when I traveled, I would reach out to the local nonprofit LGBTQ+ organizations and ask them if they had anyone they suggest I get in touch with. So I would partner with people locally wherever I went. Over the course of five years, we photographed and interviewed eighty-eight people ranging from age fifty, which was our minimum age, all the way to ninety. JP Can you talk about why you chose to focus on this particular age group? JTD I’m very aware that there is a generation of transgender and gender nonconforming and queer people who came ahead of me, and I felt like a lot of their stories were at risk of being lost. I was motivated to create these images and record these stories to preserve them and to fill a gap in representation. A lot of our culture focuses on youth, and a lot of the discussion around trans people in the media is focused on youth, on violence, or is somehow skewed. It’s not a humanist, complex representation.
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JP I’m interested in your artistic process. You had to make some choices about not only whom to photograph but what you wanted to portray in those images. JTD My photographic process, in general, is such that I prefer to go to people’s homes or personal spaces. I take a long time making portraits. I’m influenced by painting, and in some ways, I think about my process of putting together a photograph as being akin to painting. I always have my camera on a tripod. I use natural light; I use slow shutter speeds. There’s a lot of collaboration between me and the subject. I traveled to each person’s home and spent time with them. We always conducted the interview first. That was important to the process because it allowed us to get to know one another before making the portrait. Sometimes people would share things in the interview that I would incorporate into the portrait. There’s a portrait of D’Santi who spoke intensely about music, so we incorporated his guitar. There’s a portrait of Bobbi holding a plane because she spoke about her long career in the military. After we conducted the interview, we would focus on making the portrait and I would look around for a space either in their home or right outside of their home that felt representative of them. From there, it was a lot of back and forth about pose and gesture. I do a lot of directing when I’m making a portrait, but I try to direct each person into the most authentic version of themself. I’m not asking them to perform, but I am trying to make a portrait that feels representative of who they are. It’s also a significant part of my work that the images themselves are beautiful and seductive. I want to pull a viewer in through the formal elements of the photograph before they even think about of the conceptual elements.
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