Switch: A Photo Series on Gender Presentation

Portrait photography has long recorded how people wish to be seen. Switch, a series by the Toronto photographer JJ Levine, borrows that tradition to raise questions about gender. It was presented at the gallery of a Toronto archive devoted to lesbian and gay history.

How the pictures are put together

A quick glance suggests formal photographs of heterosexual couples in dressy clothes. A longer look shows that the images come in pairs, and that each pair features the same two people. Every model appears once as a man and once as a woman. Since the faces and bodies are identical in both pictures, a viewer cannot easily tell which presentation matches the model's own identity.

The models include cisgender people, meaning their identity matches the gender assigned to them at birth, as well as trans and gender-diverse people. The photographer described the figures as deliberately exaggerated gender types, and the project as a study of fluidity and of the gap that can open between a person's sense of self and their physical body.

Friends in front of the camera

Levine photographs people already known personally rather than hired models. The reasoning concerns trust and power: the bond between artist and subject tends to show in the finished image, so the artist wanted that balance to be as level as possible. The work also asks subjects to be vulnerable, which is a hard request to make of strangers.

The work asks subjects to take part knowingly, and participants understood the premise beforehand. Posing in a presentation that differs from one's own identity can feel uncomfortable, which makes consent and trust central to the process.

The artist also described Switch as more staged and less personal for its models than other work, such as the long-running Queer Portraits project, where many of the same people were photographed at home as themselves.

Borrowed portrait formats

Early press coverage called the images prom portraits. Levine explained that the series draws equally on the department-store family portrait and the wedding portrait, all studio formats built around heterosexual convention. The familiar look serves as a vehicle for ideas that depart from convention.

Wider context

Work of this kind belongs to a broader body of Canadian art about gender identity and expression, in which words such as genderqueer, androgynous and transmasculine describe differing self-understandings. Switch stands as a documented example of that conversation, and its original gallery run is long finished.