Holding Space evokes a sense of altruism. A giver of sanctuary without expecting anything in return. A guardian of someone’s physical, mental, and emotional state by being present with them. A book collecting anthologies of stories and photographs of queer couples. A project Ryan Pfluger carried out to look into the life, love, and relationship dynamics of the queer community through a queer lens.
For the project, Pfluger surrenders the narrative control over his collaborators (which he prefers to call them rather than models or subjects). Photographers who uphold their eye for concepts, visuals, and outcomes may often dictate the flow of the shoot, but the LA/NYC-based photographer freely lets his queer collaborators steer the direction of the shoot, from their movement and positions to the images that are published in the book. More so, Pfluger curates a safe space for them to be vulnerable and reflect on their relationship dynamics. Not once does he force a question for them to answer, but he offers prompts instead that soon elicit raw narratives about how the couples’ connection was founded and grounded.
At one point, Pfluger feels as if his photo book is slowly transitioning into a nonfiction book, brimming with disclosures that are now visible in the public sphere. Passersby can get a hold of his book, rifle through the intimacy that powers through every shot, and digest the revelations of the queer couples about the highs and lows of their relationships. The book, once thought of as a project, becomes a companion to navigating the veracity behind different relationships.
Present Space sits down with Ryan Pfluger to listen to him as guides us onto his own discoveries during the conception of his book, the diary entries style of the texts, the boundaries of lust and intimacy, and the challenges even he himself faced in his relationship with the people he met for the first time.
I had been thinking about this work for about a decade from my own personal relationship, history, friends, and the queer community in general. I’ve always wanted to figure out how I can explore intersectionality within photography and what that looks like and what that means for viewers. The pandemic allowed me to have the emotional bandwidth to do it. I started with the couples that I know and see what that looks like visually and how their openness is to me talking about their relationship and intimacy. After the first few, I knew that there was something there. I also thought that nothing like this had existed before, and that was the main thing. I had done a lot of research whether it was anthropology or within the arts, and how that had been explored before, but there wasn’t a lot of conversation about it. I took the idea to the Internet and posted “to anyone who’s open to this idea, please let me know.” I had a few images from couples that I had known, so I knew that that was how the work’s going to look like. I didn’t know what form it was going to take, and it kind of just took on a life of its own after that.
I knew that it would happen, which is why I went into it with an anti-photographer stance of not doing releases. I didn’t want anyone to feel like they were stuck in something that was representing them two years after the release of the book. I’m interested in the ethics of photography and what power we allow subjects to have. I like to say collaborators instead of subjects to keep control over their narrative. I think photographers love to keep that control, and this felt like the perfect body of work to explore that and what you know, what people would be willing to share if they did break up, or if their relationship dynamic did change. I felt like all of that was important for the conversation because it’s nuanced. It’s not just about queer and interracial couples having beautiful, amazing, and great lives. But I also didn’t want it to be like a trauma dump, so I had to find the balance to make the project exist at this true intersection of what it feels like having to grapple with loving someone that may never understand you and what that dynamic is. With this, I think it helps surpass the idea of queerness and becomes this place where anyone can understand those dynamics. I wanted to keep it in this place where one can say you can understand queerness, race, religion, and any other background, but this isn’t exclusive to the queer community. This is something that everyone has to deal with when they love someone and what those changes are and how to culminate those into a body of work that addresses all of those things. This is why the texts are so important to me, which led me to know that it needed to be a book instead of just a photographic project.
Yes, it was. It was that controlling of narratives that I feel marginalized people rarely have. I was aware of my whiteness and the proximity to it, and I didn’t want that to be part of the conversation. So, I did a lot of conversations during the shooting, but all of the texts in the book are the results of prompts coming from me and not necessarily specific questions. Even if there were things that I knew about them that I thought would be interesting, I didn’t want to force anyone to share anything in a public realm that they weren’t comfortable with. My only real quote-unquote rule was that they couldn’t use platitudes or generalizations, that it needed to be something personal. It didn’t need to be something sad. It needs to be something joyful. It could be anything in between, and so there was a lot of like back and forth. I wanted it to be from their personal voices and for me to be excluded. The results then are these raw narratives that speak of their native experiences. I wanted it to have the feeling of journaling. I always talk about photography as therapy and for me, the process of photographing people can be cathartic, and a lot of times, I don’t know how to put that into the work. This felt like the perfect way to mesh those two things and allow people a space to not only feel seen but listened to.
I think because I allowed that sacred space. People were, for the most part, very open and vulnerable and gave pieces of relationship dynamics that would normally only be shared with a therapist or a close friend. For me, allowing that to exist in a public place is powerful.
I think for everyone they always will exist. It’s hard to remove our personal experience from those that we interact with, but I’m hyper-aware of it more than I already was. The idea of what perception is often very different, and treating any marginalized person, whether they be queer, black, brown, or trans, we must treat everyone as an individual. No one is a monolith for say a certain group of people, which is what we tend to do. We box them like ‘this is what queerness looks like, this is what a trans person, and this is what a trans passing person looks like,’ and I think allowing ourselves to just listen changes that. Again, with someone that’s like passing as trans, allowing that transness thinking to exist in terms of the overall environment, of how we perceive people, seems okay for others, but when it’s someone who’s an actual trans, it isn’t passing. There’s a greater chance of violence and transphobia, and for this, that I didn’t want the visuals to just stand by themselves because I knew how perceptions were, even just writing about it a little bit in my introduction. There were couples who would e-mail me and say ‘I thought you were only photographing queer couples.’ That’s why I’m doing this. The idea that we live in such an image-saturated world, that we make these judgments immediately on who or what someone is, is based on appearance, and I think that we all need to be a little bit more careful about that, no matter what our backgrounds are.
I felt that they were necessary. As an artist, I think that there’s a fine line to walk on. The photographs stand well on their own, but they don’t necessarily show more of the nuances that I wanted to be talking about and so the texts and photos work hand in hand. It almost felt like going through becoming a nonfiction book and less of an artist book. I want this to be something that people could actually sit and read. I was conscious of the book size and price all throughout because I wanted to make it accessible to young people and those who live in places that don’t have access to this genre of book. I see it as like ‘there’s so much that I wanted to know that I didn’t know, and now I can because I have all of these first-person accounts.’ People are sharing a very specific part of their lives on the Internet, and this is very much about intimacy and about how it looks like in private and in the public eye and how those things sometimes don’t match up.
Lust looks a very certain way and intimacy doesn’t. We have this idea of what intimacy looks like. I’ve taught a workshop for a week in Colorado that was called ‘intimacy and photography,’ and by the end of the week, I figured I should have just called it ‘ethics and philosophies of photography’ because we have this idea of what an image needs to be for intimacy to exist. We forget that there can just be intimacy between photographer and collaborator and that alone, just allowing yourself being seen in a way that’s a little bit more vulnerable, that’s intimate, and there’s nothing lustful about that. That’s also the thing that delineates queer and gay as an artist. Within queerness, it’s a radical and political thought process that’s also a lifestyle. It’s vastly different than who I sleep with. For me, as a queer person, looking at those nuances and the beauty and subtlety that we don’t get to see ourselves as queer people in the public eye, that’s what I’m interested in. Having that be part of the broader vernacular is so important.
I never felt like an intruder. Most of the people who reached out to me and I collaborated with for the book were welcoming. I didn’t have any rules other than people needed to be touching in some way. It could just be as simple as holding hands or walking down the street with their hands locked. I allowed people to feel comfortable with me, and then there was a lot of conversation in person that happened before I even started photographing. People ended up being open to whatever state they were in during the shoot. In terms of how far they were willing to go, I never felt like I pushed anyone into something that they weren’t comfortable with. Every couple had the go signal of what photos would be in the book. There had been some intimate photographs that didn’t make it in the book, while there had been some photographs that I thought were more interesting and engaging but weren’t necessarily intimate that are in the book. What I found the most interesting in general was that people who reached out to me ended up being this perfect slice of 20 to 45-year-old queer people, which covers pretty much everything. I also think that there’s this beauty of the queer community that’s so intersectional. If you do 100 couples, you’re bound to cover everything.
I think the entire thing, starting with me communicating with hundreds of people. The fact that I got around 200 people that were complete strangers to sign on to something within a year during a pandemic was something that I would never have imagined. I did the whole project over the course of around 14 to 16 months, driving across the country and spending two or three hours photographing people. Some of them even ghosted me midway through, which happened a lot. I didn’t know these people personally, so there was a lot of trust and confidence to and honesty of strangers. There were different types of couples that I met or encountered during the project. Those that didn’t break up, that are still together, that are not in the book, that just either stopped responding to me after they got the photographs, and those who said ‘I just don’t want to be a part of this.’ I do understand that if you don’t want to be part of this conversation, you don’t need to be, and the other part of me is a little hurt about it since I spent all this time, money, and energy to not even have the mutual respect to get an explanation, at least. That was challenging just as a human being. As someone who’s a working photographer and very used to rejections on a continual basis, I took it personally because the project was not something I needed to do, but I invested myself in it so to not have the kind of baseline level of respect in some cases was hard. Still, it was everyone else that made it worth it. I’ve made beautiful friendships and the couples themselves were the reason why I did this. This was for them and not for me, and I’m excited that it’s now in a form that everyone can enjoy.
For the last 15 years, my work as a photographer has been meeting strangers off the Internet. I’ve always found it fascinating to use social media in ways that it’s not meant to be. Five or six years ago, I drove cross-country for six times and would just randomly message people on Geo location apps like Instagram, Yelp, and Grindr, so I’ve always been used to just entering and exiting peoples’ lives in that way. It was a little bit different for the book just because I was on the opposite end of it where it was the people reaching out to me and me not knowing what I was getting into. Bu there weren’t any experiences throughout this whole body of work that felt unsafe or insincere. People were very invested, so it never felt off. In a lot of cases, it felt like I knew these people my whole life.
It circles back to what I said earlier about misconceptions. The main reason that I became a photographer was because I wanted to learn, and it felt like the easiest to learn from actual people by having a thing to facilitate meeting people that wasn’t for professional or sexual purposes. It’s like meeting someone for a coffee, but we’re just going to go take photographs and hang out for the day, spending the time listening to people that you don’t know, even just for a couple of hours. That experience informs your life in many ways, if you are aware of giving that the energy instead of just going through the motions. I always relate it to me on set where when I’m working, half of the time people don’t even know my name. So, I become fully invested in that territory of entering someone’s life with no expectation of seeing them again. I always have myself open, so if people do want to continue contact with me, I’m 100% here for it, but I have no expectations for people to do that. It doesn’t mean that I don’t take away so much from those interactions. In fact, I’ve learned and evolved so much as a person and an artist. Each previous thing informs the next thing I do.
I’m a child of therapy, and so the phrase ‘holding space for yourself’ is so often used and misused. I went into making this work, knowing that I not only wanted these couples to hold space for themselves and for that power to exist in their vulnerability and intimacy, and sharing that with others, but I also wanted it to be a book that people could hold space for them and that they could hold space for people that they didn’t know and taking in their life, their journey, their experiences, and their realities.
