The intimate and emotional work of American photographer and archivist Carson Stachura is driven by a mission to make the Trans community “feel seen, not looked at.” Together with their chosen family, they are reimagining the values of image-making to cultivate a safer and more expressive mode of making. Stachura talks to writer Gem Fletcher about the paradox of Trans visibility, why photography is never neutral and their desire to hold space for Trans people to self-actualize on their own terms.
Carson Stachura’s project “My Body is a Weapon (Waiting at your Door)” is about love and desire, gender and freedom, vulnerability and friendship. The people we see—Ezra, Noah, Eliana, Clair and Clem—are Stachura’s friends and lovers, the family they made for themselves. Together, they build their own world, using photography to explore their gender identity and reimagine what desire can look like outside of cisnormativity.
“I made the work during a significant time,” Stachura explains from their home in Queens, New York. “I was about to start hormones. I had just got a gender-affirming chest reduction. I just changed my name. I was figuring so much out.” Despite the weight of the nascent stages of their transition, the work has a pulsing undercurrent of optimism, informed by experiences Stachura has had at Queer Trans clubs and parties in New York City. “The dance floor is where I can be my most expressive self,” they tell me about the series, which takes its name from a lyric in “Kaltes Klares Wasser” by Chicks on Speed. “I reach this bodily feeling of ecstasy, where I can just exist. That feeling is something I try to recreate in my images—the weightlessness of gender dysphoria lifting.”
In her introductory essay of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Nan Goldin writes, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” Finding Goldin’s words when they were starting out validated everything for Stachura, whose artistic potency is fueled by their profoundly intimate relationship with their chosen family. Through spontaneity and collaborative play, they hold space to make each other “feel seen, not looked at,” expressing themselves on their own terms.
“While we’re seeing ourselves more in the media, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people have the material necessities to survive and thrive,” says Stachura, referencing the paradox of Trans visibility, a theory coined by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton in the anthology “Trap Door.” The text addresses the challenges faced by the community as they grapple with the simultaneous rise of Trans representation in culture and anti-Trans violence in the streets. “When the media spotlights one person who embodies a specific kind of Transness,” Stachura says, “the intersection of their identities plays a role in how they navigate the world. This impacts people who don’t fit into those specific categories; those embodiments of Transness get rendered illegible. Essentially, this rise in Trans visibility doesn’t equate to safety.”
Stachura’s work as an archivist—they are currently studying for their Master’s in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute’s School of Information—is the bedrock of their practice. Understanding the way that photography has historically disconnected Trans people from their autonomy, primarily through the transmedicalism of their existence, has enabled Stachura not just to devise a system of values but reimagine their entire image-making process from start to finish.
At first glance, the visceral and emotionally authentic quality of Stachura’s photographs could be mistaken for a documentary, but their intimate monochromatic portraits are carefully staged. “My chosen family joke that every shoot is a ‘production,’ they explain. “That’s spot on. Evidence that the shoot was produced shows that I was intentionally there, and mediating this photograph is a way of resisting photography as passive or neutral.”
Pushing at the boundaries of art has long been the purview of LGBTQ+ artists who seek to subvert the system. For Stachura, this is about refusing the notion of photography as the sole property of the person behind the camera, and using DIY forms of dissemination, such as zines, to transmute their ideas. “Over time, I’ve realized there’s a lot of power in being able to self-publish your photographs and have an audience beyond the confines of the algorithm,” they tell me. “It’s a ‘fuck you’ to the surveillance and censorship unfolding across social media, and a way for the work to materialize in a form that can be physically shared.”
For all its celebratory vibrancy, “My Body is a Weapon” is an inherently political body of work grappling with vital questions: Can image-making cultivate a more reparative world? Can photography depict traces of an experience without making it a spectacle? Can an image-maker and sitter have a more reciprocal relationship? While Stachura is committed to offering an alternative to photography’s extractive past, making work with their community, for their community, is their priority. “If I can translate a gender-affirming energy into my photography, to offer my chosen family a way to be truly seen, and to self-actualize on ‘our own’ terms,” they say, “then that’s all I really want to do.”