Roula Seikaly speaks with iO Tillet Wright about Self Evident Truths, his ten-year project (and now photography book) of 10,000+ humanizing portraits documenting people in the USA that identify as ANYTHING OTHER than 100% straight.

I was champagne-drunk while listening to United States President-elect Joseph R. Biden formally address the nation on November 7th. It was also my birthday, and there was much to celebrate. When I heard him include trans and queer Americans in a long list of people to whom he owes this victory, as though he was naming family members, I cried. I thought of my transgender wife and all of our friends in queer and other marginalized communities for whom the previous four years particularly have been terrifyingly fraught, and how it may be slightly easier to breathe now.

With that in mind, it’s a pleasure to introduce this interview with photographer iO Tillet-Wright. In 2010, Tillet-Wright embarked on a nationwide project to photograph people who are generally lumped into the category “LGBTQIA++,” which the photographer/activist rightly calls out for how it generalizes the otherwise glorious variations within queer communities.

10 years and 10,000 portraits later, the project Self Evident Truths: 10,000 Portraits of Queer America celebrates individuality that is barely contained within the photographic frame and holds immeasurable possibilities beyond a clumsy acronym. Published by Prestel this October, the 544-page book is monumental for its size, scope, and content - “10,000 faces of survival, charisma, and charm” - alike.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with iO Tillet-Wright

Vinay, 21, manager, and Taye. © iO Tillet-Wright

Roula Seikaly: Thanks for agreeing to speak with me, iO. Let’s start with the time frame for this project. Why 10 years, and why 10,000 portraits? Why are those framing elements important to you?

iO Tillet-Wright: Ten years was by accident, 10 years was by necessity, 'cause that's how long it took. It was not at all intended to be 10 years. Ten thousand grew to be a necessity to achieve the goal of capturing the actual breadth and scope of the community. Originally, it was a couple hundred, and then it became a couple thousand, and it rapidly became clear that to make this an actual retrospective, or document of the breadth of this community, it had to be all 50 states and 10,000 people.

Seikaly: Do you want to carry this project forward? It's a milestone that you've met, 10 years, and 10,000 portraits.

Tillet-Wright: I would like the project to continue as a self-submission project.

I no longer want to be the gatekeeper of participation in it. I think that it becomes problematic for me to have to take the portrait, so I would like it to continue to live online where people can submit their own. But, yeah, I think my era of being the arbiter of the image is over.

Thor, 48, self-employed. © iO Tillet-Wright

Seikaly: Could you describe an average portrait session? Are there any sitters who stand out in your memory?

Tillet-Wright: Sure, yeah. So it's very, very fast. I set up a backdrop, it's a black piece of cloth, it's all in open shade, so it's all-natural daylight. There's no glam, no interference of any kind, really. The person comes, stands there, it's generally like, can you take a step forward or backward? Okay, chin up or down, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, and sometimes people are like, "Do you want a smile? Do you want serious?" And I say, "I want you to be yourself," and then I take the picture, and sometimes I can get it in one, two or three frames, but it depends.

So, if I'm going to shoot somebody, like one person that I've gone to their home, then we have a little more time, but a lot of these shoots were done at large gatherings, so I would get up and make an announcement, "Oh, this is what we're doing, we're doing this big document of the community. If you'd like to participate, please go over there." And then people would kind of like stampede over and there'd be this big long line.

Seikaly: Yeah.

Tillet-Wright: So, it would be “step in here, great, thank you so much, click, click, click, click, click, have a nice day, here's the postcard of how to find us. Thank you for doing this. Bye. Next person.” And I did 276 people at Chicago Pride, for example. So like at that point, it's just very fast. But yeah, there are tons of people who stick out. Not just photographically, some people are just incredibly striking and moving, and then some people just have an extraordinary story of things that they have gone through or things that they bring to the table.

There was a girl, I don't know if you read the intro to the book, but there was this person in Maryland who was trans and she was Guatemalan. She has, I think it's muscular dystrophy, and she had basically been disowned by her family first for being disabled, and then when she came out as trans, they basically were like, "We're gonna put you on a plane back to Guatemala and dump you in a field."

And stories like that, you don't soon forget. I grew up in New York, so I grew up in this sense of queerness's normalcy. There's like a texture and an intimacy to getting to know diversity and like actually getting to meet the people for whom the daily practice of being themselves is a struggle.

It's not to be naive about it, but I grew up also with self-repression and all of these things, but having an 18-year-old come to the shoot in Mobile, Alabama, whose grandmother had to drive him because his parents don't know that he's gay, and like him changing into his gold leggings in her car and then like changing back out of them into his jeans to go home, those little things are just revelatory and beautiful in a really touching way. The project has completely changed the fabric of who I am.

Lisa, 24, self-employed. © iO Tillet-Wright

Seikaly: What does that mean for you? Could you go more into that, how it's changed the fabric of who you are?

Tillet-Wright: Well, I realized that I was trans about halfway through. I lived as a boy from age six to 14 full-time, and I was just a trans kid, but somehow in my world, the era that I grew up in, the '90s in New York, I was still just playing a role, or I was a tomboy, or whatever. I didn't really make space for that to be the reality. And about halfway through my 10 years on this project, I was talking to this trans guy in Boston and he was just breaking down his experience and I started just probing and asking more questions, and a light went off and I was like, "Oh shit... " And that's on a personal level, or at least on a my-journey level.

When I started this project, I had theoretical ideas about community, and about activism, and about queerness, and it strangely reinforced my theoretical instincts, which were that the idea of this LGBTQIA++ acronym is a disservice. In the end that all proved that I found evidence of my instinctive theory, which said, "It is a disservice for us all to be lumped together, except in so far as the way that we come together as family." I think that it's a great, great disservice to us that we all get lumped into one category because so many are invisibilized by that.

Seikaly: Absolutely.

Tillet-Wright: So in a way, this project is a document of something, but also a read of something. It's a criticism and a push back. It's like, look how diverse we are. How can you say that we're one thing?

Seikaly: As the person behind the camera, do you think that the gaze is at play in this project? I ask because you had mentioned you don't want to be the arbiter necessarily. You are witness more than anything to this, yet you're using a tool that has been used to demonize difference of any kind.

Tillet-Wright: Certainly. I think the gaze is not removable, but I did my best. The setup was very calculated. Everyone being shot straight on, not really posing, not really being manipulated in any way in terms of plan, etc. That was a choice because I wanted to remove as much of my gaze as possible, even so far as in situation, as the house, and be like, "Oh, okay, let's shoot you in your bedroom versus your bathroom." I didn't wanna create any of the messaging, the unconscious cognitive messaging of any of those choices.

So I tried to remove as much of my choice as possible, and when people would ask me what I wanted in terms of, "Well, do you think this shirt is better than that shirt?" my answer was always, "Whatever makes you feel most yourself."

The fact that I was trying to remove my gaze, as a matter of like, even that is a choice. So, of course my gaze is always there, but what I was trying to create was a removal of self, to create a platform for honesty and just like a window into these people's eyes. And I wanted people to be able to look at how people dress, how people hold themselves, without it being about me finding myself. But ultimately, I did find myself through the project. It's a complex, folding-in-on-itself answer because the truth is, the removal of gaze is a gaze in and of itself.

Shane, 28, U.S. Army. © iO Tillet-Wright

Seikaly: Yeah, absolutely. You've spent a lot of time thinking about being the person behind the camera, and all the power that that activates, and whether or not you accept that power. You clearly understand all that's implicated in the gaze, the harm it can do, and wanting to shed as much of that as possible.

Tillet-Wright: Yeah, it's like that's a really fundamental aspect of this project that I think is different from many others that I've seen trying to document the community, or trying to document different slices of the community. There tends to always be more direction, and some people, I'm sure, find that boring because in a lot of ways this is like a yearbook. What I was trying to get at was also like a nod to mugshot, because that's so often how we've been cataloged as we go to jail, for being gay or being whatever.

So, I wanted to veer towards that. I was really inspired by them and like photographs of victims of genocide. I love the fact that so much humanity is translated through an image without you having to do anything. You don't need to be outlandish in any way for so much to translate and that. I wanted to reject the photographer’s power of manipulation. So, I tried to revoke it as much as possible.

Seikaly: When I read the book’s introduction, the reference to Tuol Sleng sent a bolt of cold lightning shooting down my spine. That project is harrowing, arguably one of the most important projects produced in the medium’s history. That registered first in my mind, just before the yearbook aesthetic that you pointed out. Inspiration feels like the wrong word, but it’s evident that the atrocity that happened there was on your mind. It’s extraordinary.

Tillett-Wright: Well, thanks. It's nice to have someone who understands what that means actually look at it.

Seikaly: Self Evident Truths registers to me like Edward Steichen's Family of Man in terms of its scope. I'm wondering what other large-scale photography projects you thought about as you worked on this.

Tillet-Wright: Sure. In The American West, it's very obvious. Small Trades was a big one for me because I love documenting working people. And Bernd and Hilla Becher's Houses. I love the rigid formality of the way that they photograph every house in the exact same frame. It just equalizes things in a way that our society doesn't. The fact that Cara Delevingne is photographed in this project the exact same way that a farmer in Idaho is photographed.

We don't do that in our culture right now. Certain people are given more time, more credence, more gravitas, and a better lens. We just care more about honoring the humanity of certain people. I'm really, really against that, and so I wanted to make sure that this project valued everyone's humanity equally, not only in terms of how it was shot, but also how it was displayed. So, every exhibition that we've had and in our original plan for displaying the images on the National Mall - all of these things COVID killed.

It's always been 100% free to participate and 100% accessible, and 100% free and accessible to view the images, and they are always all displayed basically at the same size and in the same way. That equality is not what our culture always does, which is like, well, here are all of the celebrities and they are six times bigger than everybody else. We don't do that. We don't play that bullshit with this.

iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum -- and asked many of them: Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are? Most people, it turns out, consider themselves to exist in the gray areas of sexuality, not 100% gay or straight.

Seikaly: Why is it important that this project live in multiple forms; as a book, as a website and as an exhibition? Why is a book important when, for viewers, looking at the website or going to an exhibition might be easier to access?

Tillet-Wright: The exhibition is, in a way, the least important because it's the thing that the least amount of people can interact with. It was designed as an opportunity for people to interact with large scale, 5 ft x 6 ft portraits of people within a community that is being discriminated against on a mass scale, and encourage people to vote to protect us. That is not something that I think I will revise the idea of after the election like the moment has kind of gone. The book is essential because it's the only place where you can see the full scope of the whole project in one place.

I think of it as a little time capsule of love and protective-ness for people who live in places where they can't be themselves and they don't experience community on a daily basis. 41% of trans people try to kill themselves and that, I think, has a lot to do with isolation. So for me, it's like a, hey, here are 10,000 people who are waiting to take care of you and protect you and have your back and be your friends and be your co-workers when you are free of whatever is isolating you right now. Also, I want it to exist in schools and in libraries and places where people can study this moment in time, and can study this community in exactly the 10 years when we got so many of the rights that we were fighting for.

Reverend Jakob, 34, hospital chaplain. © iO Tillet-Wright

Seikaly: Yeah, absolutely.

Tillet-Wright: The website is important because you will be able to submit to it on your own, and that's how so many people interact with it. It's a different thing. People go to that and they're finding themselves and using it, but so it's just like a modern whatever, but the book to me really is the penultimate object of this project.

Seikaly: Was there anything about the production process that surprised you?

Tillet-Wright: Oh, everyone involved in making this book was this fucking saint because they had to deal with 10,000 images. And they did it with such grace and kindness, and the fact that we managed to keep all of the images in order and everybody has the right name for the most part and the right age and occupation is unbelievable. I'm incredibly grateful that anybody wanted to take this on, and then my friend Allie at Prestel wanted to do this is a great blessing.

10 Years and 10,000 Portraits of Queer America