Texas Isaiah Offers Glimpses of Intimate Visibility
‘Every Image Is an Offering’ celebrates the Black transgender and gender-nonconforming community, capturing the beauty of visible moments.
For International Transgender Day of Visibility, in partnership with the Marsha P. Johnson Institute and VSCO, visual narrator Texas Isaiah presents Every Image Is an Offering. The project celebrates the beauty of the Black trans and gender-nonconforming community through the lens of its members. Below, the writer Jess Arndt explores the nature of this visual series.
Our individual image-shapes are conceived both inside and outside us. Surface and interior are made durable, photographically, by a gleam of light or shadow we can’t always control. Brooklyn-born image maker Texas Isaiah instead calls himself a visual narrator — holding space for the sitters he works with out of a mutual, consensual approach to how we present our physical matter, or mattering.
“I remember we had conversations about it, me and Texas Isaiah,” says Cat, who sat for Texas Isaiah in a dusk-lit Los Angeles park earlier this month, “about what it means for trans people to be seen in a way that’s not from anybody else’s gaze, but from the community’s gaze.”
Every Image Is an Offering is a new body of work by Texas Isaiah centering Black trans and gender-nonconforming sitters through portraits taken in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland in each sitter’s chosen location. The project is a series of shared experiences that uniquely re-script what visibility might mean.
Texas Isaiah’s approach reminds me of Vietnamese-American poet and prose writer Ocean Vuong. “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’” Vuong writes in his novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, “but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.”
“I think this project has made me fall deeper in love with the work that I do,” Texas Isaiah says. “Not so much with what I produce, but my idea of what consensual image-making can look like.”
For the two of us, it’s a chance to build new intimacy in an otherwise rapidly unspooling world. Texas Isaiah and I share a city and overlapping communities, but don’t personally know each other except in the ways we’re starting to know each other now, while things fall apart, or at very least reorder themselves epically.
We talk about the 90s (he was in a hardcore band), nightclubs as homes to marginalized bodies, about how Black trans femmeness is primary to his work, what kind of camera he uses (Sony a7R II), and increasingly, about art-making and systems of care. Things are happening in both of our lives that we have to somehow — crash course — learn to metabolize.
This now is, of course, a world away from three weeks ago, when he was still shooting images for Every Image Is an Offering. We can’t meet as planned in the studio. I’m quarantined on a minuscule off-the-grid island and he’s navigating the micro and macro shifts in the daily, ever-increasing shutdown that is the second-largest city in the U.S., i.e. Our Lady, Queen of the Angels — L.A. But his studio is outside “the studio” anyway, remade with each sitting. It’s the space between two people, or between a person and the many bodies they inhabit, between intimate history and shutter click now, between a person and topography/self.
“Studios are expensive,” says Texas Isaiah, drawing from a DIY punk ethos that’s rooted in the specificity of POC trans voices/bodies. “We turned to the streets.”
Today, March 31st, is International Day of Transgender Visibility. We’re all cordoned off, no doubt. Visible to each other only over social medias that work overtime to collapse distance while we, collectively, fight an invisible threat. Viruses screw with visibility. But viruses are semi-alive — they live through us, ARE us. Gave birth to us — created, for instance, the placenta. This kind of inside-out thinking is normal for bodies on the margins.
And visibility itself is what Texas Isaiah is thinking about, or feeling through. A single image of POC trans life, or even a large grouping of them, can never speak for all of something. Instead of offering totality, Texas Isaiah points elsewhere. “When we have participated in visibility, we always leave someone behind,” he says.
The portraits of Every Image Is an Offering were taken in parks, homes, office spaces, yards, and along L.A./Oakland streets. Sometimes the sitters are in pairings with a partner or conspirator. “It is essential to feature the everyday lives of Black trans people and to provide images that do not entirely disregard trauma but provide a fuller aspect of our lives,” Texas Isaiah says.
His images are the product of an attuned concert between Texas Isaiah and sitter, balancing on each sitter’s consent to show what, to whom. Of course, image-making, like moving through the world as trans, intersex, or gender nonconforming, bends surface into a pile-up of layers.
“My practice can feel new and overwhelming for people,” Texas Isaiah continues. He starts each collaboration by asking the sitter to choose somewhere that they “feel somewhat comfortable in their bodies.” But there’s always the very real chance, he says, that they might say: “I don’t have a place that makes me very comfortable.”
When comfort isn’t an option (it often isn’t), they navigate it together — including steadfastly implementing Texas Isaiah’s practice that each sitter choose which images to keep and which to discard.
“Being witnessed is something we call for, we desire,” he says, “but when it’s in front of us, it’s scary.”
The resulting portraits bear the print of time spent in each other’s company — sweat, air, physical moves. In one series, “Cat + Turay,” parts of the sitters’ anatomies — a foot twisting, a shoulder under a tank top moving out of the frame, two pairs of Nikes touching while the sitters’ legs extend away through the planes of the image — make the work feel porous, diffuse, tender, provisional. Like a group hang near some olive trees that could blur into night or, at a moment’s notice, decamp for some falafel.
As the series grows, Cat and Turay’s faces take up more of the images — joyful, into each other, but also pensive, fierce, and, at times, in the swell of feelings that seem to veer away from each other’s immediate shared moment. In other words: here, whatever “here” might mean.
“There’s a layer of not needing to worry about how this person sees me,” says Davia, who sits for the project against the greenery of her house as well as with another sitter, Star. “Especially when someone is wielding a camera, they are going to capture what they see. And so if they don’t particularly know how to see the beauty and my transness, they won’t know how to capture that on camera or on film.”
What if representation isn’t about finished product, but process? What if filmic “capture” is actually a release, and by release I mean self-as-multiple, contradictory, self-as-flood? What if Texas Isaiah’s “offering” isn’t toward an audience, but moves as a gift to the community from which it comes?
Viruses are evolution markers: they make complexity legible and ask us to respond. If the lesson of this moment is, use what you have, Texas Isaiah already knows it, is out there creating the curve. “It’s small moments we can figure out how to be in together,” he says.
Instead of reproducing trauma, or paving it over, Texas Isaiah’s process allows for the full-on, ever-widening galaxy of lived Black trans experience(s) to come through his images, proliferate, and breathe.
Texas Isaiah (above) is a visual narrator based in L.A., the Bay Area, and New York City. His work focuses on the possibilities that can emerge by inviting individuals to participate in the photographic process, collectively shifting the power dynamics within photography. This approach centers the intimacy created and nourished between a person and a place.
Jess Arndt’s debut story collection, Large Animals (Catapult, 2017) was shortlisted for the California Book Prize and is currently under reprint with the U.K.’s new queer press, Cipher. Their writing has recently appeared in The LA Review of Books, THEM, Lithub, Hazzlitt, Fence, BOMB, Night Papers, and in collaborations with the Swedish band, The Knife. She/they (below) live in Los Angeles and Washington State.
The Marsha P. Johnson Institute protects and defends the human rights of Black transgender people. We do this by organizing, advocating, creating an intentional community to heal, developing transformative leadership, and promoting our collective power.
