Photographer Soraya Zaman’s American Boys Series Tells a New Story About Masculinity

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Photo: Soraya Zaman

How do you create a safe and respectful on-set environment for subjects who might be at various stages of their gender journey?

With this particular project, I went and met everybody; the goal was to be invited into their homes and to make sure they felt comfortable with that. Before I even took my camera out, I would sit with them and just talk and say, “Tell me about you. How did you get to where you are now? What was your childhood like?” I would record all those conversations on my iPhone, and because a lot of what people were sharing was about being gender expansive while growing up, there were a lot of things that we could relate on. That really kind of formulated a bond and a trust. I wasn’t some outsider dictating the narrative; it was part of my narrative too. It was really collaborative; I would let them pick places where they wanted to be photographed, and we would drive around and go to all those places. It was just like two people hanging out, talking, and taking pictures, and I feel like that’s the kind of intimacy you see in the photos.

Is there anything in particular that you hope people take away from these photos?

I wanted to call out and challenge the notion that masculinity belongs exclusively to cis men. I always think about the language of the boy-girl [binary]. That’s just language, and we are more than language. Gender is larger than that.

Zaman’s photo installation “Reconstruct (the) Normative” is on view at Melbourne’s Fed Square.