RADAR! Alex Webster
Anyone who navigates around the status quo and creates their own lane with fresh vision is someone whose brilliance should not go unnoticed. The gumption to acknowledge what is comfortable for many and then deliver a new interpretation that expands perspectives is a true gift and one that Alex Webster (they/them), a NYC based photographer, doesn’t squander. Their work typically centers on Black queer and trans life and inspires empowerment in this community through journalistic, fashion and editorial photography. Notably, Webster’s journey includes some time abroad in Tokyo where they cleverly documented the oral histories and portraits of people from the African diaspora living in Japan. This kind of journalistic approach peppered with striking composition is just one of many reasons why Alex Webster should be on your RADAR. In this exclusive interview they give us a look inside their creative process and share poignant motivation with a bit of clairvoyant vision of the future.
In your words, describe what it is you do and why you do it.
My becoming a photographer was catalyzed by frustration—frustration with the voyeuristic history and ongoing legacy of the photography medium, frustration with being otherized, tokenized, and pathologized, frustration with the colonial framework through which our bodies, genders, and experiences are inevitably parsed when viewed through the lens of people outside our communities. Why it is it a rarity that we—Black folks, Black queer folks, Black trans folks—find our likeness captured for us, and by us? Why must our stories and such intimate things as our image be filtered through people on the outside looking in? This is changing, and it must, in the age of social media, self-curated content, and an explosion of Black, queer, and trans creatives. I see my small body of work, and projects to come, as a mandate, a demand for agency over our stories and ownership of our visages. It is still aspirational, but it is my northern star and guiding principle when falter or lose sight of what I am working toward. I wish to see my community joyful, empowered, and thriving, the authors of our own archives through such mediums as photography, storytelling, and oral histories. We can, we have, and we must be the chroniclers of our own memoirs and mythologies. My work is political; it aspires to be archivist, afrofuturist, liberatory, and Black feminist. I wish to see Black queer and trans people treated with care, dignity, and tenderness, and our melanin captured in all of its shades of richness. And in doing so, urge us to reject the myth of scarcity and embrace our right to abundance. Abundance not in nihilistic ways—though pleasure, too, is central to this—but recognizing that our needs can be met, our desires satiated, and joy found (in excess) when we work and build collectively and with a shared vision.
How did living abroad in Tokyo influence your work? What’s another place on your wishlist you would like to spend time in or document?
Firstly, deciding to uproot myself from the U.S. instilled in me a deep appreciation for migration, who is allowed mobility, and for whom the topic of movement is fraught, policed, and criminalized. Living in Japan taught me so much: the international reverberations of anti-Blackness, it also granted me clarity—oftentimes through adversity—and a different lens through which to perceive myself. In my experience, Tokyo is a place that engenders solitude. Lianne La Havas captures this in ways I never could in her song Tokyo from her 2015 album Blood. Living there was disorienting for many reasons, one being how I could feel anonymized by the cold hum of the city, and the next moment othered and hyper visible. My privacy was never truly my own when my Blackness made me stick out like a sore thumb. Japan was also a time when I began to contextualize my relationship to my body and gender, and later when I would begin to understand how being queer, non-binary, trans, and Black could be experienced not only as a set of descriptors, but also in practice. The solitude, anonymity, and unconsented visibility were at times jarring, and forced me to sit with myself and interrogate with a certain degree of introspection who I was, what I valued, and who I wanted to be. Japan is where I kindled my love for photography, it’s what birthed the Diaspora Japan project, an oral histories project I created in my final year there. It’s what taught me the meaning of community and found family through the Black folks and queer folks I met on this journey.
As for next destinations, I hope when it’s safe to do so I can travel to the African continent—I read a lot of novels and non-fiction that take place in West African and touch on cosmologies indigenous to various regions of Africa, particularly Nigeria and Ghana. I also follow the work of many African visual artists whose talent can only be described as stratospheric. Seeing their homes through their lens gives me such a feeling of yearning. I feel at home in big cities, so places like Lagos, Dakar, Accra, Nairobi, Johannesburg are all on my list.
How do you come up with your art direction and what’s the energy like on your sets?
Photography is a medium that by virtue of the patriarchal, white supremacist, and classist cultural context in which it was born and exists, still suffers from deep inequities pertaining to resources, opportunities, and representation. One way in which this is felt tangibly is the degree to which deference and credit is paid to individual (usually white, usually male) photographers. But in truth we photographers would be nothing without our communities who trust us to capture their image and our creative partners with whom we manifest reality from imagination. For me, this means the creative direction process I subscribe to is one where we encourage one another to steer direction and collaborate without hierarchies, build on one another’s ideas, and share ownership of the outcome. When I work with individuals, this also means building into my workflow dialogue with my subjects to empower and enfranchise them to feel agency over the work we create together. Everyone can be the creative director of their own story with the right guidance.
I’m also someone who believes that from start to finish the process of creating is immersive, experiential, it requires trust and dialogue, and ultimately while making good images is a crucial goal, it is second only to making lasting memories and deepening our connections to the people we collaborate with. For that reason, I see myself as much a photographer as a facilitator. Facilitating the people I work with to be in tune with their story, feel affirmed in their body, and feel held through the process.
What’s an accomplishment that you are really proud of in your career?
I’m not sure that this is a career accomplishment per se, but on March 28 I completed my second community studio day—the first of which took place on December 13, 2020. The first time, I invited Black queer and trans folks to join me in the studio and create images together, and this time I invited Black trans femmes. I’m so deeply honored and privileged to be surrounded by and trusted by people in my community, and feel so full after spending a day uplifting, caring for, and tending to the people I love, and receiving that in return. After we wrapped and I was in the studio with two close friends, I broke down in tears from exhaustion, gratitude, and a distinct feeling of growth and accomplishment.
When you think of the fashion photography landscape, what would you change if you had the power?
This is a question I think about often, and a conversation that can’t be separated from longer term visions for my communities. It’s important for us to be represented in the existing institutions of fashion, and slowly (too slowly) this is happening. However, without a transfer of power and creative control, this relationship is one-sided, abusive, and parasitic. We’re seen as consumers to be marketed to, and our representation hinges on the reliability of our buying potential. I see progress when a Black trans femme can headline a campaign, when Black trans folks are represented on Time Magazine’s most influential people list, etc. but without a fundamental redistribution of resources and decision-making power to our communities, I fear we’ll remain tokenized and eventually cast aside when the industry picks up on a new trend. We deserve not only a seat at the table, but to sit at its head. This means shifting sharply from simply granting visibility to Black queer and trans, meanwhile underresourcing and undercompensating those creatives, thinkers, and leaders. But the white supremacy, anti-Blackness, queerphobia, transphobia, fatphobia, and ableism, exist to sustain themselves at our expense, and I have little faith in these institutions and ideologies to dismantle themselves. My goal and the goal of the people closest to me is to divest from these tables and—as we’ve always done—build our own.
Who would you say has influenced your creativity the most? Who do you consider icons of our current or past culture?
I am most influenced by my collective Black queer and trans siblings both historic and contemporary. They push me creatively, drive me to think expansively, and ground me in my times of need. They are the icons of the past, present, and future.
Has the pandemic taught you anything or changed your world in any way? How does this affect your work?
The pandemic has reminded me that we have everything that we need, we can name and claim abundance, even in the hardest of times. I’m inspired by my Black trans siblings who have taken lemons and said, we can’t sustain in lemonade alone. They traded those lemons up and managed to whip up Thanksgiving dinner. It has reminded me to never settle for simply surviving when me and my people are entitled to and deserve to thrive.
Is there anything you want to experiment with as your career evolves?
I’ve recently picked up film photography for the first time. It’s a format that I’ve always found intimidating and out of reach financially, but one that as I explore it deeper I find is teaching me valuable lessons in patience, intention, and intimacy. In the short term, this is something I’d like to experiment with further.
If you could snap a photo of the future what would it look like?
The future is Black, queer, trans, and femme, it is a radical reimagination of our relationships with one another, it is safety, it is affirmation. I often think about the future in relation to the sensations—what does it look like, smell like, taste like, feel like?
What is love?
Love (love of self and love of others) is being willing to transform.
@alexwebsterphoto
Article by Ayoka Lucas, Contributing Fashion Editor, PhotoBook Magazine
Instagram: @ayokalu
Tearsheets by Victoria Durant, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
