The idea for The Migratory Patterns of North American Queers at the Turn of the Century came about when I started to use blank baby and wedding albums from Goodwill to practice arranging the stills from my films into a book format.
An unexpected juxtaposition emerged when I would superimpose my film transparencies into these manufactured books meant to hold and order our culture’s most defining life milestones.
These books, created to provide people a standardized format to present their life and family history with text and photos, suddenly took on new meaning beneath the images I took in my twenties during my search for a place to belong on the West Coast.
The contrast was poignant: the visual search for queer self-actualization—moments that have no designated narrative space in the collective imagination—underneath the textual blueprints for society’s most sanctioned life events.
As I composed my own photographic albums with these found materials, I realized I could simultaneously write an interactive photo album that others could use to frame their own migration narratives using a queer lens.
These pages are proofs of a concept. Drafts or book dummies that I have assembled to show people the idea that has been incubating in my heart for nearly ten years.
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The Migratory Patterns of North American Queers at the Turn of the Century 