On Location 3: Appliqué

As part of my investigation into queering spaces and creating a queer intervention on your surroundings, I decided to go to a bar in Falmouth and apply some make up. This is envisaged to be a series of performances of putting on make up in public places and how people react to it.

Again, I can't tell you how scary this was - the knowledge that you were going to do it, but the people around you probably don't know what the hell is happening and probably don't even care. Still, the intrusive presence of the camera makes people shaky. As soon as you start clicking off photos, people think, "What is he taking pictures of?", or they move out of the frame, or object to their privacy being invaded.

So I set up the tripod, but then I bottled it. Fortunately, I was waiting for a friend and so I waited until she came and she said, "Not doing it is sometimes just as important as doing it" and I think this is an important discovery – asking ourselves why we feel this way. The reason I wanted to do it was because I knew the gesture would look strong on the image, but I was surprised that I still felt constrained by perceived societal gender roles.

Determined, I downed three pints of milk stout and – emboldened by beer – I asked my friend if she would press the button while I put on make up.

One of the biggest problems was that it took place indoor and I had to compensate for the indoor light. I wanted a reasonable depth of field so I had an aperture size of 8, but that meant the exposure was quite long – 1.6 seconds. The ISO setting also had to be boosted to 500... I really wanted as little grain as possible. Example shot:

I wore a suit to emphasis the male gender performative in order to openly subvert that with make up and provide a strong masculine/feminine contrast.

At one point, someone came up to me and asked what i was doing. I just honestly replied "It's a piece called Appliqué about putting on make up in public places." He then went on to tell me that once upon a time he studied photography and we laughed about Jeff Wall, before he moved on.

I took 74 photos but only two quite captured the effect of Appliqué. Because of the low light, it was only the strong red colour of the lipstick that managed to show through. And so I colourised this to emphasise the monochromatic flavour of the scene:

Appliqué

The long exposure time actually adds to the anonymity of the people in my surroundings because of the motion blur as they turn their heads, coupled with the removal of colour, the queer gesture of applying the lipstick actually becomes something that 'gives colour' to the scene. The figure in the foreground looks off into the distance, momentarily distracted. The lipstick runs off the lips... Is this an absent-minded gesture or is it a sign of mania? Are the people dressed in reds and blues in the background also tainted in a different colour? Are they tainted with queerness?

I feel like Appliqué could become a series... Perhaps if I just distilled it down to a man in a suit applying lipstick rather than 'full make up' it would be simple, but encapsulate a sense of queerness and this would be a quick, simple action that would be less intimidating.