Acceptance

The book Acceptance seeks to answer the question “What does family mean to you?” and reveals that the many different interpretations of that answer are in fact strikingly similar. Creating a family is largely about accepting the role you step into as a partner or as a parent. You accept a new situation, the other person, and yourself in a new way. You accept your own helplessness and vulnerability, and the fact that you are connected in a special way to both the past and the present. Acceptance also means embracing the reality that families take many forms: many are heterosexual, but many are LGBTQ. Who are these people? What concerns them, what challenges do they face, what do they fear, and what do they dream of?

Despite its direct visual language, my photography is largely about working with what is absent and invisible. My goal is to make the unseen visible so we can engage with it, to look at something and realize it is not so different or frightening, perhaps even as ordinary and mundane as what we already know, or to think, “Oh, how interesting, I imagined it differently.” Accepting the truth that the difference between families lies not in the genders of those within them but in the fantasies they project and how they manage them is crucial. This truth gives shape to reality: it allows us to shift facts, to make room for acceptance or rejection, and to choose whether to see or to hate.