Queer NZ in the raw and on display
Photographer Becki Moss hopes her show Queer Portraits of Auckland will remind people that ‘we’re all human first’.
The diverse faces of Auckland’s queer community are being showcased in a photography exhibition. Queer Portraits of Auckland is on display in Freyberg Place in Auckland’s CBD until February 16 – coinciding with the city’s annual Pride Festival.
Photographer Becki Moss was inspired to take the 30 portraits after attending an event at LGBTQI-plus nightclub and events organiser Queer As F... (Queer AF). LGBTQI-plus is an umbrella term for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, or identify as a sexual or gender minority.
She said the series is ‘‘a little more vulnerable and raw’’ than traditional nightlife photography, which is often lighthearted.
Moss, who came out publicly as queer last year, captured the photos at Queer AF events she had attended at the Basement Theatre.
‘‘I really liked all the vibes there and [the] feeling like I’m in a safe space. You don’t stand out [there]. It doesn’t feel like you’re a majority or a minority.’’
She hopes the exhibition will remind people that ‘‘we’re all human first’’.
‘‘I wanted to be able to capture the community in a different way. The first thing you will see will be the faces and the people.’’
Each image will be captioned with the muse’s name and pronouns.
The inclusion of pronouns instead of the person’s occupation or age was deliberate. Moss wants to normalise the practice of specifying pronouns among cisgender people, as well as trans and non-binary people.
Cisgender people are people whose gender identity matches the gender they were labelled as at birth.
Moss wanted the photos publicly exhibited because she’s passionate about making art accessible to everyone.
‘‘I’m hoping that more people will be able to engage with it at their own level of comfort. I think people should be able to see art without the exclusivity of the art gallery scene.’’
The exhibition, funded by Auckland Council, is part of an ongoing series by Moss, totalling more than 60 images of queer Aucklanders.
While she’s proud of the diverse range of people featured in the photos, Moss says they’re not representative of the entire rainbow community and acknowledges her position of relative privilege as a white, middle class cisgender woman.
‘‘This is my view so far. I think sometimes we forget about how much is just a small part of the picture that an artist or a photographer captures.’’
Rural Australia provides one of the best places to drive. To really drive. To test the very limits of your vehicle and willingness to embrace oblivion.
Many years back I was tearing my way across the vast hinterland of Queensland in a rather shaky Corolla.
I wanted to see if I could get the needle to 200kmh and as I closed in on my objective the Corolla began to vibrate. The rattling grew exponentially as the engine strained to push the hurtling death-trap towards my arbitrary goal.
By the time I’d reached 200kmh the car was on the verge of disintegration.
My mind conjured up an image of a bilby bouncing onto the road at just that moment.
The vehicle would have collapsed around the marsupial, leaving me holding nothing more than a steering wheel as I was propelled into asphalt at what would have been a terminal velocity leaving the bilby bemused but unharmed.
This, dear readers, is a metaphor for our economy. And that bilby is the coronavirus.
The global economy has been turbocharged on debt for the last decade and it’s starting to vibrate.
It’s incomprehensible because we’ve never had to comprehend it.
The United States, an empire in terminal decline, is running annual deficits equal to five times our entire GDP.
Their sovereign debt is now more than $20 trillion.
It has blown past the psychologically significant 100 per cent of GDP and no-one in charge over there seems to notice – much less give a skunk’s backside about it.
Japan is in ever far worse shape but don’t worry; the central bank is propping up the stockmarket by printing money to buy shares.
I consider myself fairly competent with words, but I don’t have any to articulate how recklessly stupid this is.
But what really wants me to get back in that Corolla and crank the needle again to 200kmh is the complete lack of concern that anyone who should be concerned about this stuff has.
It doesn’t matter where you look:
Australia, the UK, the EU, every sovereign nation worth half a farthing has sovereign debt at least half their GDP and all are going up.
And before you place your hopes in private firms; don’t. If you own shares take a moment and read the annual reports.
Most of our large listed entities have debt levels equal to at least a decade of their profits. In many cases they have interest payments that are a third of their annual earnings.
And this is when interest rates are lower than the ethical standards of a second-tier insolvency practitioner.
Household debt in most nations, including our own, has continued to rise, even as real incomes are in slow decline and economic growth has plateaued at two per cent; the rate of population growth.
New Zealand has been relatively lucky, having a low debt-to-GDP ratio, but Grant Robertson’s election-year gamble of tossing fiscal responsibility into the wastebin will soon fix that.
In a sentence; we have built our economies on debt-funded consumer, commercial and government consumption and this has been possible because central banks have manipulated interest rates to be effectively zero for a decade.
It all seems fine. Until it isn’t. Imagine an airline with $2b in debt, $6b in revenue and just $270m in post-taxprofit.
It’s incredibly finely balanced. Even a small increase in interest rates or a dip in bookings would push it into the red.
And that scenario is repeated in every second building firm, restaurant and retail store in this land and those of our trading partners.
Everything has to go right to keep this economy hurtling down the road at 200 clicks. And then something happens.
In 2008 our economies were far more robust than they are today. Debt levels were lower, interest rates were higher, and most governments had fat in their balance sheets.
We have none of this luxury. We’re just waiting for that metaphoric bilby, or black swan if you prefer, to trigger a collapse.
I don’t know if the coronavirus is that bilby. I expect that it will burn out the way other media-driven hypes like Sars and ebola, but it may not.
School starts back next week. Expect to see more children than usual being kept home, a slower than usual trade in restaurants and Pak’n Save to be doing better trade than their boutique competitors.
Holidays will be cancelled or postponed. Building projects will be put off, along with whiteware and new vehicle purchases. It could all build on itself.
Fear is a powerful driver of irrational behaviour and it’s a lot more contagious than a virus.