Robin Eames
Robin Eames, 2022. I Am Who I Am series (ongoing)
Andrea Francolini
photographic print
We actually took the photo in my apartment building’s carpark. That was just the most convenient space to set up the backdrop and all the lighting equipment - and my poor neighbours were wandering past going ‘What?” (LAUGHS)
I do love that this photo series gives us such as sense of the many different communities that the trans community overlaps with Audre Lord said “There is no single struggle because we do not live single issue lives” and I think that’s very much reflected in this exhibit and in the entirely of the exhibit that the State LIbrary has put together here. Our liberation is bound up together and none of us are doing this alone which I think is a really comforting thought.
My name is Robin Eames, I am a poet and historian living on Gadigal land and I use they/them pronouns. I think we need to take joy in community, joy in shared struggle, in shared resistance, and joy in trans history and trans lineages. I’m so proud and so grateful for everything’s that possible today because of the people who came before me, including dedicated activists and also just ordinary people living their lives, like Edward De Lacy Evans and Bill Edwards who you can learn more about in the Strange Characters exhibition in the AMAZE Gallery, which I was commissioned to work on by the State Library.
I do think it’s really important to remember how partial and how fragmented glimpses we get from archival records are. We might not have records for the entirety of our communities across the past but Jules Gill-Peterson has pointed out that that’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly for trans women of colour, for people who are multiply marginalised within the trans community, because when we don’t have records it means that people weren’t having these, often hostile, encounters with the state, with the courts, with police, with prisons. It just means that people were just living in peace.
And I think as much as I do yearn for more of a sense of trans history, you know, knowing what the last few hundred years have been like, it’s not the worst thing for people to kind of escape the archive.
I love this photo series - I love the opportunity to get a glimpse into the lives of ordinary trans people in the present moment - and how much is just encapsulates trans joy in a political moment where I think we really need trans joy and trans pride. I think taking joy in the many facets of community helps to give sense for the kinds of solidarities we can build, not just between each other but between our movements and between the, sort of, many different histories and many possible futures that you might get a sense of through this exhibition.
Robin Eames