Leland Bobbé began his career taking slice-of-life photographs on the streets and subways of New York City. Shot in black and white, they are images of a city that is, in many ways, no longer there. Since then, his career has encompassed everything from commercial photography for History Channel and Sprint to fine art photos of landscapes and grizzled Texas cowboys. (To see his full portfolio, visit his website, lelandbobbe.com.)
If you haven’t seen his latest series Half-Drag—images of drag queens halfway made up to show their male and female personas—it could be that you have, as they say, been living under a rock. Slideshows of it were everywhere this summer, from Huffington Post to abcnews.com, and it’s not hard to see why: the images are gorgeous and beautifully shot, but also perplex the eye and can be looked at over and over again. Perhaps because he has been making pictures for three decades, Bobbé approached Half-Drag the old-fashioned way, forgoing all digital manipulation—what you see in the image is what happened in front of the camera.
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Along those lines, though digital slideshows make art accessible, nothing compares to seeing an actual, physical, photographic print in person. Lucky for St. Louis, the first exhibition of prints from Half-Drag will be shown at phd Gallery on Cherokee. Half-Drag: Photographic Portraits of New York Drag Queens in Half Make-up by Leland Bobbé opens this Saturday, October 20 with an opening reception from 7 to 10 p.m., and Bobbé will be in attendance. We spoke to to him by phone about what it was like to go viral, the techniques he used for shooting Half-Drag, and his work past and present. Half-Drag runs through November 24. For more information, go to phdstl.com or call 314-664-6644.
On New York, and his early work:
I’ve watched this whole city change. Those pictures from the ’70s, you look at those pictures of the street guys in Times Square, these down-and-out guys on the Bowery. I still can’t believe what’s happened to New York. It’s unbelievable. I started calling Times Square Las Disney, because it’s like a cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland now.
On what it’s like to go viral:
I first started noticing small blogs that would have the pictures, from my blog. They had the names; I always included the names. And then it started appearing more, and more, and then the requests started to pour in from all over the world—Germany, France, Finland. Easily, it was over 25 countries. I looked on my Google Analytics the other day, and it was over 2,000 websites and blogs…So that’s how it happened. So, once it hit, I got a request from Italian Vogue, and I thought, this is really getting big-time. It all happened within a two-week period. I remember it was the first week of August, the 8th, 9th, around there—Huffington Post, ABC News contacted me. MSN… Before I started this project, I was getting about 350 visitors a week on my website. Now, I have weeks of 20,000, 17,000, in the month of August, my website had 89,000 unique visitors. The whole viral thing, I’ve never experienced anything like it, and it’s very exciting to say the least.
Maddelyn Hatter
On the origins of “Half Drag”
I had done this two-year project—I had no idea it was going to last two years, but there were so many people—I was doing studio portraits of burlesque performers. I ended up having a big show at the Museum of Sex in New York in March of 2011, and really near the end of all, there was one male burlesque performer that I had photographed. I saw a picture on Facebook—this guy is named Doctor Flux, very creative guy. And there was a picture of him out, and it was just a snapshot, but he was half-man, half-woman. I don’t remember if it was full-length or three-quarters, but it was very well done. And I thought to myself, wouldn’t this be something impactful, if I just do something close and tight on the face? So I got in touch with him, and asked him if he would like to kind of re-create that in my studio. So we did that, and it wasn’t shot as tight. It was more below-chest, where these are more shoulders and up. And he did a great job, and it was different, he was wearing a hat, and he held up a prosthetic breast on the female side, he shaved half of his chest.
And the shot was, I really liked it. But I filed it away, and put it on my website. Then, last fall, I was at a photography industry party, hosted by The Workbook, which is a source book that photographers advertise in. And the theme was Carnival. They actually used one of my burlesque pictures as a poster for it. They had burlesque performances, and they had drag queens serving hors d’œuvres. And at that party, I was introduced to one of the drag queens, and we exchanged cards. The person who introduced us sort of said off the cuff, oh, you should do a project with drag queens. I kind of put it away in my brain, and this is like the end of October, and the holidays were coming up, and I kind of let it marinate in my brain for a couple of months, and then January, I thought, “I’ve got to o something with this.”
I called the drag queen, and I told him, would you like to come in? And let’s do a tight half-and-half. I thought I could take that first idea, but do it with a drag queen. He said sure. I did it, and I was really happy with it, and I did a few more, got some recommendations from him, used Facebook as my primarily as my means of contact, and then when I had about four that I liked, I put them on my blog. And like once a week, or once every two weeks, I’d put another one up here, and I started to get some good feedback. But I didn’t have them on my website yet. I wanted to have about 25 or 30 up, and in order to that I wanted to have more than that shot, so I could edit down a bit. Once I put them on my website, around the end of June, I don’t know what happened, but at that point, it just went viral.
On the connection between the two projects:
Most of the burlesque people talk how their makeup came out of watching drag queens. Some of the veterans say, “If you want to know anything about burlesque, go to a drag show.”
On vulnerability vs. camp:
If you go through all 30-some pictures, there’s no smiles, there’s no campiness. A lot of being a drag queen is being big, and over-the-top and campy, and I wanted them to look very real. Some people had a very hard time with it, some people had a very easy time with it, same thing with the burlesque performers. That’s very big, with a ta-da moment and everything. But I wanted to bring everyone back in and do very real, just kind of direct portratis. I think it’s much more real when someone puts on something, it’s kind of fake, and it gets right through into the real persona of the person. And I think that’s a large part of what’s resonating with people. You can keep looking at them. When I see pictures of people with big smiles, I can look at them, but I get bored with them. There’s something more provocative about this, that you can just look at and keep looking at it.
Roxy Brooks
On process:
The makeup and the hair take the longest, The shooting is the quickest. I’ve got my lighting down, so as far as the process goes, they come in as males; I always tell them to come in with whatever beard growth they can muster up after four or five days. I have them shave the female side. Then they make up the female side of the face. We’ve discussed everything ahead of time, I’ve met everyone before, we go usually on Facebook and look at their pictures, and I say I like this makeup or that makeup, or bring these two or three wigs. Then we’ll decide exactly. The hair was the trickiest part, because I didn’t want any hair on the male side. So they would make up half their face, and then we would put wigs on. They’re all cropped into the forehead, which is the main thing that allowed me to keep that male side clean, because it really didn’t matter what the wig looked like up top. I would either sweep it off to the side and pin it back, or they would put it on crooked, or the wig would be folded; one guy even came in with a wig that was cut. I mean, these aren’t expensive wigs, these are like synthetic hair wigs, they can probably buyt hem for $30. And that process, honestly, it would vary, because people vary in the amount of time it takes them. Sometimes it was an hour, sometimes it was two hours. Sometimes it took three hours. Then they’d come out, then I would do intital tests tethered up to my laptop, so I could see any stray hairs or make adjustment, look at the lips and the eyes, see if they needed more blush, all that stuff. My wife Robin was always with me on-set and she would always help a lot, deciding what was right and working with the hair, which is definitely the trickiest part.
On what we’ll see at phd Gallery:
This new picture I took, he’s Thai. He wanted to involve some of his culture in the photo. Have you ever seen Thai women in traditional dress? They have these long finger-things, they’re gold and they’re really long, they point and they swirl up at the end. We incorporated that into the photo; he’s holding his hand up and you had to be very careful about where to place these things to make it look good, but he wanted to bring a trandtional Thai elemtent into the shot. It’s one of my favorites right now, and I’m going print it for the show.
On what “Half-Drag” means to people:
I have to be completely honest, when I started doing these, it was really from a visual impact point of view. It’s really interesting to see a face really perfectly done, and obviously my execution is high level, with the lighting, my direction and all of that stuff, people really respond to that. But what people really responded to was this whole gender fluidity thing. This whole exploration of the line between male and female, and the power of just what makeup can do, and hair can do. Everyone always does this, where they take their hand and they cover the male side to see the female side, and you take your hand away, and you can’t even believe it’s the same person.
Once it went online and people started responding to it, I started getting feedback from the gay community and the lesbian community, and the whole gender fluidity community and the whole transgender community, and that’s where it started to really resonate with people. I’m a straight guy, happily married, who wasn’t part of my objective to really explore this, but it just happened. I can’t say I set out to do this, or I set out to do that. In a way, it reminds me of when someone writes a song and they have an idea of what it’s about, but then people read into it and see all kinds of other things within the lyrics. To me, that’s very much like this. I got emails from people about how important this was to them, and how much it inspires them because they’re transgendered, or gender-fluid. It was very inspiring to a lot of people. And that made me feel very good when I started getting things like that.
Miss Fame
