PIXEL IDENTITY: ON RACE, GENDER, AND IMAGE
My name is lambda.velorum, i’m a filtered photography artist. i’m a mixed french and iranian genderfluid person. i started producing filtered and coloured photographs around 15-16 but did not hold on to it for long. i picked up photography again and worked with black & white filters when i was 18, taking interest in urban signs, transportation and architecture—i was looking for structures and transitions. as i moved into reflecting more about my gender and race my style shifted and i started experimenting with a pink filter that i have been gradually strengthening and altering to produce real colour confusion (i’ve been asked to show “real photos”, instead of the colour-altered ones). when lacking new scenes, i switched to using the front camera to be my own filters’ guinea pig.
In my second year at mcgill – my second year taking persian – i made a weekend trip to toronto. before taking the bus back, i was walking downtown when i heard persian being spoken. as i turned back, i saw two ultra-queer iranians speaking to each other. i had a moment of epiphany—“we exist!” i didn’t reach out and have regretted it since. i was deterred by the perceived awkwardness of the situation, scared of going up to them and not being able to hold up the conversation in my own family language—how could i go up to say “manam irooniam! [i’m iranian too!] if there was a chance i wouldn’t have understood their reply?
Until recently i have felt mostly disconnected from my iranian heritage, and it is still something i struggle with—being white-passing, having had to learn persian at university (rather than through my father) and having had the chance to interact with iranian people other than my father only after entering university. exploring my gender identity furthered isolated me and rendered difficult my attempt at finding peers with whom i could share similar life experiences.
Iwonder what kinds of identity exist under the filter. do my filters offer distinctly digital identities? do those identities have some physical reality? as the frontier between digital and physical blurs, i hope that the question will become irrelevant. already my identity reflections are influenced by people like travis alabanza, alok v menon, and other non-binary activists of colour i’ve experienced digitally – live on instagram or facebook – more than in other realms. when more and more people discover their identities through the internet, how do our identities and communities exist physically? and how do they blossom digitally?
Changing side of the camera gave birth to my series “pixel identity,” where i started to look for reflections of my gender and race through the filter. the filter sometimes offered me femininity and iranianness, sometimes both or something else. in my moments of solitude it offered me recognition, without the presence of the other. by taking over my own act of photography i found a digital other - the filter/me - that showed me a person i could recognise as iranian/femme/ humanoid/alien.
All my pictures were taken with my phone and filtered through relatively accessible tools, i.e. apps. my work is also about accessibility: what counts as photography? the movie tangerine was made on an iphone 5s, why wouldn’t my pictures be artistic? what about the selfie—can it too be art? or will it remain a generation’s narcissistic gymnastics? and is using a filter cheating? what is artistic about manipulating filters digitally?