my tenderness will protect you

Photographer: Fiona Smith

• story/Description

  These collaborations are part of my ongoing exploration of the power of vulnerability, tenderness, and emotionality, and the ways that transgender and gender expansive people find strength outside of societal ideas of power. We speak with our bodies to the power of connection, and the strength it takes to be truly vulnerable. We abandon constructs for our own power. There is clarity in this shift of perspective. Through our queerness/transness we find the spaciousness to discover more abundant ways of being.

  These photographs give a glimpse into our experiences: the feeling of being seen in the context of authenticity and rawness. We express these forms of tenderness and emotionality as radical tactics in a violent world that views vulnerability as weakness. Together we create and capture emboldened, wordless moments – characterized by a kind of open-ended intimacy suspended uniquely in time.

  Fiona is currently working on large-scale multi-year photography project that represents genderqueer, transgender and gender expansive people, exploring their experiences of power through vulnerability.

• Team Credits

  Model: Jamuna Kaur

  Model: Kai

  Model: Kymil Jeneé

  Model: Aloe

  Wardrobe Stylist/Model: Sage Tran Model: Adrienne Yeung

  Model: Moonyeka

  Wardrobe Stylist/Model: Nancy Tran

  Photographer/Wardrobe Stylist/Creative Director: Fiona Smith

  Model: Shy

  Model: Sonj Basha

• Wardrobe Credits

  Fiona, Sal & Nancy

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