I discovered photography in the summer of 2009. I was studying abroad in Beijing to prove to my overly-cultured and obnoxiously-worldly boyfriend that I was better than him. I had studied Chinese in school for seven years and, at that point, I thought it was the most interesting thing about me. Toward the end of the trip, I sought refuge from the organized group-activities and decided to go for a walk through a marketplace called Wangfujing, a famous shopping street. Walking through the entrance gate felt like stepping into an alternate universe. There, among the red lanterns and discarded old machine parts was a twin lens Seagull camera.
Seagull was a Shanghai based camera company founded in 1958, which, at the time, I knew nothing about. I still don’t. But the camera was only $20 and came with a leather carrying case. In pursuit of the purchase, I was able to practice my Chinese by haggling, so overall, it was a great investment.
I learned to use the camera on the streets of Beijing, taking pictures of anything I saw. My friends, street signs. At one point a group of men lined up to have their portraits taken and I ran out of film before I could photograph them all. I barely knew how to use film and was truly guessing what f-stop and shutter speed to set-- I wasn't even sure what those words meant. But the running commentary about my camera struck me, “wow, Matthew’s camera is so cool.”
Yes.
My pictures were overexposed, most didn’t even register on the film. But I was cool, so who cared?
That year, 2009, was the year everyone was too thin and high on cocaine, or, at least that’s what it seemed like to my 19 year-old self back in New York. I think people blamed Ryan McGinley for the aesthetic but it was just the aesthetic of the era. That was the year Tao Lin wrote “Shop-Lifiting in American Apparel.” Perhaps not even coincidentally, it was also the year my boyfriend, at the time, was arrested for LITERALLY shop-lifting in American Apparel, an event I later recounted to Tao Lin’s ex-girlfriend who randomly became my best-friend for 3 months in the Spring of 2010, let’s call her Laura.
Laura thought that was hilarious. She had recently broken up with Tao, and I with my boyfriend, so we had a lot in common– broken hearts and a superiority complex.
2009 was the year of Grindr, which I didn’t discover until two years later in Berlin in the summer of 2011. It was also the year someone committed suicide by jumping off the balcony at Bobst, the school library. And the year I got way too stoned at a party while wearing leggings that zipped up the sides, and an oversized “fashion” tee, for which an older faggot made fun of me.
“Are you wearing a dress?” he said, rolling his eyes. I like to imagine he’s balding somewhere in the midwest.
At the time, I said nothing, but wondered if my fashion statement was too bold. Looking back, that look was iconic. It was this big grey oversized t-shirt with some kind of snake print. I had just shaved my head and on top I wore an orange and lavender Paul Smith beanie my grandfather gave me because it was “too young” for him. I think it was the first time I recognized my grandfather as stylish. Even if he wore it only once, it was pretty cool a traditional, 75 year-old man bought himself a soft orange Paul Smith beanie. For footwear, I wore my favorite leather boots. The leggings were unzipped to reveal a white stripe down the sides and I topped it off with a Marc Jacobs tiny clock I wore around my neck on an extra long silver chain. To be 19 and have any kind of style is a big deal, but based on my current 35-year-old sartorial taste of frumpy cashmere sweaters and a singular pair of high wasted, wide leg, “sensible,” corduroy pants, that look was iconic.
Sometime later, after I discovered that twin lens camera and learned how to use it, I discovered the gay male appetite– “gappetite” –for being photographed, and my own gappetite thrived.
I’m not sure when I started to understand more clearly that the venn diagram between men who wanted to have sex and men who wanted to make photographs was basically a circle. But at the time, in the summer of 2009, in that market in Beijing, I was just excited by the equipment. I was excited by the possibility that this old camera, likely made in the 1950s, somehow bestowed on me a lineage of photographic history that I could step into, inhabit, and make real again.
Photography, it seemed, gave me power. At the time, posting photos online was still novel. Instagram didn’t exist until 2011 and an interesting Facebook profile picture came loaded with social caché.
Photography made me interesting. It gave me the power to willingly strip people naked and perform something beyond themselves. It gave me the opportunity to spend real time with interesting people around New York City. But more than anything it helped me explore and live my fantasy life.
I was instantly hooked.
Thank you for reading !
See you next week,
Matthew