Unseen Bonds and Imagined Histories

The 2020 COVID pandemic partly inspired the two exhibits currently at the Houston Center for Photography (HCP).

Anne Leighton Massoni, executive director of HCP, is a cultural and medical anthropologist by training. While considering possible exhibition topics recently, she began to ponder the long-term social effects of COVID-19.

“For me, the idea of another generation being affected by an illness that was significantly impacted by proximity or touch was very similar to what I had experienced as a child with the HIV epidemic,” she explains. “I was thinking about the history of illness and the history of touch, and this came out of that.”

The exhibits are spread over three spaces. In the largest space is one titled Marc Ohrem-Leclef: Zameen Aasman Ka Farq–As far apart as the Earth is from the Sky.

Brooklyn-based Ohrem-Leclef has spent seven years documenting relationships between men in India. Male friends there, both heterosexual and homosexual, openly hold hands and hug. At the same time, the country is decidedly anti-gay. Sex acts between consenting adult men were only recently decriminalized there, and same-sex marriage has yet to be legalized.

“I was captivated by his work in India for a lot of reasons,” Massoni says, “especially the idea that it is commonplace for same-sex friends to be in close proximity to one another, to hold each other by their pinkies, to lean in and embrace.”

Ohrem-Leclef’s images show young men embracing and taking selfies, sitting on each other’s laps, hugging in parks, and working side-by-side on construction projects. The photos beautifully reveal the intricacies of male relationships in India, from friendship to love, and from sexuality to queerness.

Without knowing the background of the men in the photographs, it’s impossible to say “this is a gay couple” or “these are two friends.” The expression of regard and warm feelings, with or without the element of sexuality, looks precisely the same to a viewer.

The men Ohrem-Leclef worked with are hiding in plain sight, says Massoni. They express their feelings and acknowledge their relationships without risk of rejection or condemnation by the public.

Ohrem-Leclef, who was born in Germany, is openly queer. He’s seen as an outsider by the men he photographs in India. It’s that shared sense of otherness that helps him to bond with the men and allows them to discuss their feelings of love and how they cope with being gay in an often repressive culture. He’s spent hundreds of hours talking with his subjects, learning about their lives and how they navigate the complicated journey of self-expression.

He calls the men he photographs “collaborators” rather than subjects. Hundreds of statements from his collaborators are included in the exhibit along with the images. Printed and posted around the gallery, the statements discuss what it means to love another man as a friend and sexual partner. Ohrem-Leclef asked them what they thought about, what their heart wanted, and how they experienced touch and love.

He’s recorded hundreds of those statements in 20 languages, resulting in some 4,000 pages of transcripts. The exhibit’s evocative title derives from one of those statements: an anonymous collaborator in Punjab used the Urdu/Hindi saying “As far apart as the Earth is from the sky” to allude to the endless possibilities of life while simultaneously recognizing the impossibility of many relationships.

“One of his collaborators says it’s the most extraordinary thing in the world to be intimate with someone and also be hiding in plain sight,” says Massoni. “Their physicality and touch with one another is not construed as homosexuality in a country that’s still very discriminatory toward the homosexual population.”

The other exhibit, TOUCH / do we exist without photography, features the work of Kris Sanford, Andrés Pérez, and Matthew Finley. Each of those three photographers has created a fictional record of LGBTQ life.

“With Kris Sanford’s work, what she was after was to find a photographic history where she felt represented,” explains Massoni.

For her work entitled Through the Lens of Desire, Sanford used found photographs from the 1920s through the 1950s that showed groups of men or women. She reframed the images, hiding parts of the people’s faces, essentially making them unidentifiable—a device that creates an overtone of implied sexuality. Are those people who are hugging in one image siblings or lovers? The viewer decides.

In An Impossibly Normal Life, Matthew Finely creates a world where queer love is wholly accepted.

“Matthew talks about when he came out to his parents and his mother told him that his Uncle Ken was likely gay. Matthew said if he had known his uncle was gay, his own coming out would have been entirely different—perhaps less fearful, perhaps with less shame,” says Massoni. “In response, Matthew built this photographic album for his Uncle Ken with this extremely positive photographic language surrounding him.”

Andrés Pérez contributes Dead Family, an examination of family portraits that attempt to give often-ignored, diverse identities visibility.

WHEN:  Through November 24
WHERE:  Houston Center for Photography, 1441 W. Alabama St.
INFO: hcponline.org