jul 11, 2016 - Photographer-Activist
iO Tillett Wright
Is Now Designing
Gender-Neutral Denim
Description:
Photographer-Activist iO Tillett Wright Is Now Designing Gender-Neutral Denim
iO Tillett Wright started raising consciousness with the LGBTQ awareness project Self Evident Truths. Now, with a gender-neutral capsule collaboration with L.A. denim brand Mother, Tillett Wright hopes to cut the bias out of fashion as well.
"A closet is just a box of identities," says iO Tillett Wright. "A little wooden cabinet of costumes that we pull out every day and say, 'This is how I'm going to project who I am to the world.' " The 30-year-old transgender artist and activist has spent the past six years conducting an epic study of identity, photographing 10,000 LGBTQ people for an online portrait series titled Self Evident Truths. Its subjects range from Cara Delevingne and glittery friends-of-iO like Amber Heard to Gurls Talk feminist domain founder Adwoa Aboah, plus thousands of others found through social media and word of mouth, from 15-year-olds to octogenarians: "anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum," the artist says. Self Evident Truths has been shot across all 50 states, including, as of this past June, Mississippi—Tillett Wright hit Jackson just as the national debate over a pair of now-infamous anti-LGBTQ bills, North Carolina's HB2 and Mississippi's HB1523, kicked into high gear.
Next month will see the release of Tillett Wright's memoir, Darling Days (Ecco Press). Today's subject is Love Your Other, a gender-neutral collaboration with the L.A.-based denim brand Mother. A percentage of its proceeds will benefit Self Evident Truths' work for LGBTQ visibility, including an IRL portrait exhibit Tillett Wright hopes to stage on the National Mall on July 2, 2018, to commemorate the birthday of Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman of color who fought at Stonewall in 1969. Along with Mother cofounders Lela Becker and Tim Kaeding, Tillett Wright aims to take the question of "man" or "woman" out of getting dressed, allowing people to first and foremost look like themselves, no matter how they identify. "I'd like to debunk the idea that you have to shop in either the men's or women's department," Tillett Wright declares. "I say, 'Let's make the human section!'"
On a warm day in May, Tillett Wright gathered a group of friends to model Love Your Other. The artist mugged for ELLE's camera, dribbling a basketball in black Dr. Martens and looking like a cross between James Dean and Annie Lennox, with a flash of platinum-blond hair lit up in the sun. The friends assembled here, Tillett Wright says, "represent diversity in almost every way—gender, race, size, and age." There's Saada Ahmed, the events curator of Everyday People, a Lower East Side roving brunch party with an eclectic following; Christine Tran, a feminist activist and art events producer; former Olympic swimmer Casey Legler, the first woman signed as a male model by Ford, who has starred in Diesel and AllSaints campaigns and whom Tillett Wright calls "one of two people I can relate to when it comes to gender," plus Legler's wife, Australian human rights expert Siri May; painter Brian Robles and art photographer Matthew Placek; and Amy Gunther, a former model discovered skateboarding in Washington Square Park in the '90s, who now runs Brooklyn skate shop KCDC.
The group, like Tillett Wright's oeuvre, is a testament to the concept of non-binary identity—indeed, Tillett Wright's own gender and sexuality remain subject to revision. Born biologically female in 1985 on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Tillett Wright grew up in a community comprised mostly of punks and drag queens. The kids in Tillett Wright's scene had little by way of privilege besides the freedom to be whoever one wanted, though Tillett Wright admits this was essentially the result of neglect. "I was raised by addicts. My dad wasn't around much, and there wasn't a lot of food. There wasn't always electricity," Tillett Wright says. "But at the same time, my parents always accepted me for who I was."
Tillett Wright
Tillett Wright lived as a boy from ages 6 to 12; meanwhile, Tillett Wright's father had moved to Germany and, at 13, Tillett Wright joined him there. At 14, Tillett Wright decided to live as a "femme girl." Looking back, the artist says simply, "I figured out how to fit in." Back stateside by 17, Tillett Wright then spent the next few years as an "androgynous lesbian." But three years into Self Evident Truths, "after meeting so many [trans people], it dawned on me: 'Oh, shit. I'm on the trans spectrum.' " Recently, friends have started using the male pronoun when referring to Tillett Wright, but "there just isn't a catchall rule that feels entirely appropriate," the artist says, for people born as women who now consider themselves something in between. "I just don't feel any need to define what could—and maybe should—be indefinable."
As a teenager, Tillett Wright toyed with the idea of becoming a DJ, but spent three years, beginning in 2005, working as an assistant for street photographer and documentary filmmaker Cheryl Dunn. Inspired in part by books on the photography of Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon—a Christmas gift one year from a girlfriend—Tillett Wright went out and bought a 1960s Pentax, and spent the next year working as a studio manager for Nan Goldin. Meanwhile, inspired by Terry Richardson's candid flash photography, Tillett Wright began using a Yashica T4, a camera suited to shooting in low light, to photograph friends and, eventually, subcultural New York City heroes like performance art multi-hyphenates Kembra Pfahler and Justin Vivian Bond.
In 2010, two years before a federal appeals court would overturn California's Proposition 8, Tillett Wright was invited to participate in Manifest Equality, a pop-up group show held in an abandoned Hollywood Big Lots store. The 45 portraits Tillett Wright submitted had been shot "without artifice, lighting, or any [postproduction] manipulation of any kind," the artist explained in a now-famous 2012 TED Talk, which has been viewed more than two and half million times: "It occurred to me if [those who voted for Prop 8] could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship, it might make it harder for them to do." Thus was born Self Evident Truths. Tillett Wright set up a Kickstarter fund, asked friends for money, and even received a $10,000 check out of the blue from playwright Eve Ensler, who had heard about the project from her goddaughter's girlfriend; later funding came from the Human Rights Campaign.
Calls for subjects were sent in e-mail blasts and posted on Facebook; eventually Tillett Wright and photo producer Kashi Mai Somers had 3000-plus people lined up across 25 cities (later, their ambition would triple in scope), shoots they'd schedule on the fly as they drove from one location to the next. In Mobile, Alabama, only six people showed up; one was a 15-year-old boy brought to the shoot by his grandmother because he hadn't yet come out to his parents. "She signed the release while he changed from his jeans into Lycra tights," recalls Somers, who is now helping organize the portraits for a 2018 book. There were moments where the challenges of what they were doing came into sharp focus. "Somewhere in the deep South, we stopped to use the restroom at a gas station, and the guy at the register had a gun on the counter," Somers says. "iO had to use the boys' room. Tillett couldn't risk being mistaken for a boy in the girls' bathroom."
The more people Tillett Wright photographed, the more multifaceted and indefinable the LGBTQ community revealed itself to be. "At some point, I added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of 1 to 100 percent gay," Tillett Wright said in the TED Talk. "By and large, people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or 3 to 20 percent…. Of course, there were lots of people who opted for 100 percent, but I found that a much larger proportion of people identified as something that was much more nuanced and fell on the spectrum of what I have come to refer to as 'gray.' "
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