H. R. Department

Growing up homosexual has left me with a sense of alienation from the church and other ‘buildings of faith’ that I just cannot feel welcome in.

As a result I find such places at best creepy and at worst actually threatening.

I even went so far as to investigate why, reading books with titles like ‘Homosexuality and The Church’ and ‘The History of Homosexuality’. Now I’d have to paraphrase statements from these as I could not be bothered to even re-familiarise myself with their contents on the subject. Suffice it to say that the former left me with a sense of it depending on who you talk to as to whether or not Sodom and Gomorrah was full of leather bars and the latter seemed to suggest that homophobia arose from the general populace being sick to the back teeth of the utter hypocrisy and corruption of the clergy. Most of whom were presumed to be homosexual.

It’s always struck me that to be Out is in direct opposition to being In. Outside versus Inside. This need to locate myself lead to me recognising a theme in my photograph taking. I’ve an ongoing series that I’ve called ‘Keep Out’ https://www.labelsonhumans.com/collections/keep-out that seems to ponder all of this.

The idea of me trying to locate myself came from conversations that I have with my friend and artist Jeremy Gluck. https://www.instagram.com/nonceptualism_/ and https://jeremygluck.bandcamp.com/album/nonceptual-mixes We started work on a collaborative photograph and text project and I think it was he, annoyingly insightful as he is, who suggested the title of Locate Yourself. We’ve made quite a body of work and I’m slowly adding them here. Revisits may prove fruitful.