On Street Photography
I shoot street photography from a wheelchair. That is not a disability story. It is a vantage point.
The camera sits lower than it does for any standing photographer. Bodies are cropped at the waist, the hip, the thigh. Faces appear at the top of the frame rather than at center. Crowds become a landscape of torsos, legs, hands holding drinks, waistbands and swimwear and skin. The wheelchair gives me a physical relationship to bodies in public space that is mine specifically, and the images that come from it could not come from anywhere else.
My Street work spans four locations: Fire Island, Traversing Pride, Miami Beach, and Rodeo. Together they form one of the most geographically and aesthetically varied bodies of contemporary queer street photography being made in the United States right now.
Fire Island came first as a formal body of work, made during my BOFFO Artist Residency at Fire Island Pines in 2022 during Pride Month. I mounted the camera to my wheelchair and operated the shutter with a release between my teeth, firing every shot with my tongue. The images that came out of that month — golden skin, swinging bodies, queer intimacy in the open air — were made by a disabled gay man who rolled through that space as both participant and documentarian. Nobody had photographed Fire Island from a wheelchair before. Nobody had shown it from this angle.
Traversing Pride extends that practice to LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations across the country. Bodies in motion at street level. The geometry of a Pride crowd from four feet off the ground. Queerness as public spectacle and private moment simultaneously. I am interested in what it looks like when disabled presence enters a space that is supposedly built for liberation and finds that liberation has its own access problems, its own hierarchies, its own habit of looking past the wheelchair to the person it imagines is not there.
Miami Beach is the everyday. The muscle beach regulars, the tourists, the vendors, the cops, the people sitting on walls watching the ocean. I photograph them the same way I photograph Pride — from the position I actually occupy, without apology for the angle, without pretending I am somewhere I am not.
Rodeo is different in texture. The bodies are different, the cultural codes are different, the relationship between performance and masculinity is operating in a different register. But the same question is there: what does this space look like when a gay disabled man is the one documenting it?
I document queer sexuality and intimacy in public space because visibility is not given to people like me. It has to be made. These photographs are how I make it.
