In this body of silver gelatin mordançage prints, I explore the tension between memory and myth, absence and reconstruction, through the lens of queer identity and American masculinity. Raised without a tangible archive of family photographs, I’ve grown attuned to the emotional weight of what’s missing—to the stories that faded without capture.
Using a combination of found photographs and prints made from archival negatives on vintage silver gelatin paper, I invite physical and emotional time to surface in the material itself. The mordançage process corrodes and lifts the image from the paper’s surface, allowing the emulsion to veil and decay, introducing fragility into figures once cast in strength.
Through this process, I examine historic symbols of masculinity in military portraits, athletic poses, and intimate snapshots, reframing them through a queer lens. Emulsion peels away identity, memory buckles, and in that vulnerability something unexpected begins to surface.
These prints are not restorations but acts of speculative lineage. In reimagining men I never knew, I create a personal mythology of kinship, eroticism, and loss. This work is an attempt to make visible an inheritance that exists beyond the frame—one built from longing, reinterpretation, and the tactile evidence of touch.
