8/17/2016
Interview - Robert HamblinRobert Hamblin
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Interviewed by Dr Ernst van der Wahl – University of Stellenbosch Lecturer in Visual studies
How did this body of work come about?
My work has always been thoroughly located in gender issues. When I was younger and I didn’t spend
so much time doing art, I touched on it lightly, like a young person or a person without experience
would. While gender always interested me, my awareness of it really deepened when I transitioned. I
didn’t do any creative work during the time of my transition; it was really just a time for trying to make
sense of my own life. Changing one’s gender is such a social and public process that it needs constant
interrogation, and to combine that interrogation with your own transition is a hard experience. It is an
experience that burns one out. So I constructed a cocoon, here in my studio, to marry all these aspects
of my life and to distill these experiences into a body of work. The only time I really left this space was to
volunteer at an organisation in Cape Town called SWEAT [a local non­profit organisation that does
advocacy and offers services for sex workers].
SWEAT asked me to initiate a transgender sex worker group. After getting a group of female
transgender sex workers together, I started with a process of consultations with these participants, and
that became the portal, or the lens, through which I approached this project. This lens became a
means for approaching and bringing together a range of issues; I came to realise that, if you ever want
to glean society’s reception of transgender issues, or even gender issues, these participants’ lives
provide a space within which such matters are severely concentrated. It is the space where gender,
class and race intersect and leaves an indelible mark on the lives and bodies of these participants.
It seems as if processes of conversation and negotiation between you and these participants were quite
important as this project took shape?
What I learned during my own transition, and also as a trans activist, was the importance of allowing
dialogue to shape the creative process. To me, such a process is centered on consultation, and in the
context of my work, it means that you allow the participants to drive the process. It is, of necessity, a
slow process, one in which you cannot have a specific goal in mind. While I initially conceived of it as an
outreach project and approached it from an advocacy viewpoint, the participants replied that they
didn’t want to be shown as victims or outcasts, and they didn’t want to be portrayed as suffering and
abused people – in short, they didn’t want this project to be about creating sympathy. I thus had to
revaluate the process in order to find something that serves them and that fits their perspective of me.
To them, it was important that I accept my own role as artists, and not necessarily as activist. In order to
facilitate my relationship with the participants, I had to re­establish my own position as an artist by
departing from my role as transgender activist.
The process of negotiation between the participants and myself came to be focused on their desire to
express their own femininity. They drew my attention to the fact that they wanted this project to be
about beauty, while it should be reflective of their identity as sex workers. In addition, they also
highlighted my own role as a client – on a practical level, it means that I pay to see and photograph
them. From the start, they drew my attention to the fact that I cannot assume a transparent position
behind my camera as I was already implicated, both as a client and a spectator.
The photographic techniques that you use in these images seem to be quite important for exploring the
lives of the participants.
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I revisited my old work, and it annoyed me – especially the colour and the very sharp imagery. I could
see myself shouting, and it was clear to me that that technique was part of my life when I was really
grappling with the fact that I was unable to feel connected to the people around me. There was little
romance in the work. What really typifies my life right now is the romance of it, and it is also reflected in
my work and my relation to photography. In this body of work I was looking for something more simple,
but also more suggestive. I like the idea of sketching, of using the camera to create a drawing of sorts.
And this signals a big departure in my approach to the photographic medium – instead of trying to
bring the body into focus, to lay it bare for the viewer, I rather propose that such bodies are more
complex than a camera can always capture.
How did you negotiate the display of the participants’ bodies?
They wanted to show themselves as sex workers and to emphasise their relationship to me as a client,
and to facilitate that they had to set up a fantasy with me. That is basically the crux of sex work – the
relationship of fantasy between the client and the sex worker. They also decided to use their nudity as a
reference to the sexual act. At first, they wanted to show their whole body to demonstrate that their
consciousness of being transgender is not about denying their male bodies, but that it’s about their
expression and posturing of femininity. While gender posturing is largely about clothes, they decided to
take their clothes off to see if they can express their femininity without their clothes.
When I conducted interviews with them, they repeatedly made reference to the manner in which they
draw the client into a sexual fantasy. Some of the clients know that these are transgender workers,
others don’t, while some ignore it – it all depends on the manner in which the fantasy is created. The
participants also emphasised certain techniques for helping to create this fantasy, such as moving
around and not making a lot of eye contact. These techniques create ways of seducing, and also of
escaping. The participants also used these techniques to recreate the fantasy for the camera’s lens.
Similar to what they would do for a client, they are moving and dancing for the camera. In the fantasy
that they create for me, the sense of movement becomes important as it makes it difficult to pin them
down – it allows for their bodies to become blurred, and for them to explore and re­enact their own
femininity.
There is a sense of freedom in the work, yet you also make the viewer aware of delineations that are
imposed on their lives. How do you present that in the final body of work?
What I initially did was to surrender my focused approach to the medium, and to allow for this fantasy to
be played out between the participants and me. But then I also had to bring myself back into the
picture as they required it of me. They wanted me to locate myself in their work, and to acknowledge
myself as client, and to do so I had to acknowledge my own position as a white man, as a patriarch.
From my own experience, patriarchy leaves its mark through bureaucratic systems of delineation. From
the experience of these girls, patriarchy takes its form as rigid systems that try to police their gender. This
is the place where their fantasies fail them, where they are expected to comply with rigid codes of
gender.
In the context of this body of work, the most immediate impact of such systems can be seen in the
participants’ identity documents, for such documents locate their identities as male, no matter how
they choose to express themselves. This is a delineation, a line of gender, that they share with the rest of
society, and that marks all our bodies. There is a definite sense of vulnerability in the way that they
experience this demarcation – this is a line that, once drawn, is felt.
In the images, the line is sometimes drawn over their bodies, it speaks of being hindered and obstructed,
while in others it is crossed and resisted as it shows how these participants rebel against a system that
doesn’t always serve them. So the images explore how they define and defy that line, how it empowers
them, but also renders them vulnerable. In addition to the line, I also use the South African ID­number to
give reference to marks that bureaucracy leaves on the visual identities of these participants. In
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everybody’s identity number the first six digits represents your birth date, and the next four digits are
used to reference your gender – men have numbers above 5000, women under 5000. In these images,
the femininity that the participants present are always haunted by these numbering systems – numbers
that are absolute in their delineation of gender.
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