We were delighted to have artist Jorge Ariel Escobar join us for a Q&A session about his beautiful lumen prints from his project, Aftertaste, exploring queer desire and intimacy. The works are currently on view at the Griffin’s Virtual Gallery through March 30.
An interview with the artist follows.
Jorge Ariel Escobar (b. 1994) is a queer/Latinx image-maker who holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an Ed-GRS Fellow and received the Temkin Exhibition Award. His photographic work focuses on intimacy and desires, highlighting the ephemeral qualities of short-term romantic encounters between queer men while portraying the male form through a softer lens.
Recent solo exhibitions include the Wriston Art Galleries in Appleton, WI, and the Common Wealth Gallery in Madison, WI. Other credits include group exhibitions at the Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Candela Gallery (Richmond, VA), The Image Flow (San Anselmo, CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL).
He has further attended residencies and workshops at AZULE (Hot Springs, NC), Penland School of Craft (Bakersville, NC), and Anderson Ranch Art Center (Snowmass Village, CO). Jorge’s work is included in the permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and was awarded First Place at the TMA Contemporary Exhibition at the Trout Museum of Art.
Jorge currently lives in Milwaukee, WI, where he is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Follow Jorge on Instagram: @__jorgearielescobar
We loved your project, We Could’ve Been Something More. In this selection of images, Aftertaste, you continue to tenderly explore the intricacies of short-term romantic encounters between queer men. What has changed, and what hasn’t, as you continue to develop this distinctive visual language?
When I think about I Think We Could’ve Been Something, I feel a lot of it was focused on the traditional portrait. That project, I felt, had a lot more portraiture work where the viewer is able to have a direct gaze with the subject in the photograph. Even though all of the people that I have had the honor of getting to work with in my images are, for the most part, platonic, I think subconsciously with that first body of work, I took the title quite literally by considering the fact that there may have been a slim possibility that the men I photographed could have been a possible relationship. I took the process of lumen printing to truly romanticize them in that particular way.
With Aftertaste, what remains the same is this idea of romanticizing an intimate moment that, on the surface, maybe wasn’t anything more than transactional but wanting to feel like it was more than that. What I think is different is that I wanted to focus more on the body and just the moments on the body that may stick in my brain as we part ways. Kind of like an “aftertaste” of a food item that stays with you. I still included two traditional portraits within the work because I do view myself as a portrait photographer; I just couldn’t fully part ways with not including an image or two that gave the viewer a direct gaze, where they too could be invited into the space.
Your work crosses between digital, analog, and alternative processes. What was your
developing process to articulate desire in this series?
I try to have a really good rapport with everyone I photograph. This is a way for not only them, but for myself, to get comfortable so we can have a bit of a collaboration between us when we’re making this work. I think this kind of working relationship allows both myself and my subject to create a deeper connection, which in turn allows the images to develop a sense of desire within them.
Because I like to move fast and take a lot of photos, I find that photographing digitally makes the most sense to me, even though I do love breaking out one of my film cameras. Photographing digitally allows me to look back at images so I can find things I enjoy or things I want to change to give them more of this illusion of desire between myself and my subject.
In contrast to how I photograph in the moment, when it comes to printing, I’m very slow and meticulous. It generally takes me a while to settle on a select number of images that I want to spend time on in the darkroom because printing in the darkroom takes time, and I don’t want to waste materials on an image that ultimately doesn’t work out.
It’s all a process, and oftentimes I’m thinking about what my own desire is for the collection of prints that I’m making. I often feel like I collect a lot of images, and then after I have a large backlog, that’s when I take time in the darkroom to develop a sequence or collection that I plan on showing as an exhibition or sharing through other means.
Why did you choose to have a series of all Monochrome colors?
Early on in my art career, when I was more frequently taking film photographs, I always preferred black and white film over color, so I feel monochrome colors have always been in my wheelhouse. With my current practice of making these lumen prints, I was just experimenting with the process off and on since it was first introduced to me. I was drawn to the warm/pink hue colors that warm-tone silver gelatin paper was giving me.
I was in grad school, taking a queer theory class taught by one of my MFA committee members, and that class really made me consider my own relationship to my queer identity and, in turn, my relationship to pink. I always enjoyed pink as a color, but, you know, growing up you’re kind of told pink is a “girl color,” which really deterred me away from using pink or wearing pink in anything.
When I began to make work about queer identity, I always found myself using pink as this visual signifier of queerness. So, when the lumen print process brought me to these pink(ish) prints, I decided that I wanted to use this process to queer my photographs visually, but also placing these scenes in front of rose-colored lenses, giving the moments this fantasy or illusion of it being something more.
So really, I wanted to do this monochrome-colored series because I wanted to embrace pink as a color within my work for my younger self, who really loved pink.
What do you want the audience to take away from these photographs? This can be both as
a photographer and or what these subjects represent.
One thing I hope someone can take away from this work is the beauty of queer intimacy, especially within the current climate we are in, with LGBTQ+ rights being in jeopardy under this new administration. I like to think of my work as part of the ever-growing queer photographic archive, and I hope that is something that the audience can see when they are viewing my work.
I’ll also say that I think photography is such a magical medium, especially when working with analog processes. So, another thing I’d like the viewer to take away is how photography can really transcend past the digital image, and that it is a very tactile medium, just like other art mediums. I think the tactile nature of photography gets lost sometimes, so with my work, I really try to utilize printing processes that showcase this for the audience.
A common theme in this series is memory and desire, as well as the ephemerality of both.
What is the relationship between the intimate details of the human body that you
photograph and memory?
Memory is something I always think about in my work. Even in older bodies of work of mine, I feel there is always a conversation around memory. When it comes to the relationship of details of the human body and memory in this work, usually the first thing that comes to mind when I recall an intimate memory is the moment I’m resting my hand on someone or guiding my fingers on their chest.
Touch, being my love language, is what really connects my memory and the details of the body for me. In terms of intimacy, I always go to the subtle moments that are happening with the body—both my own and the person I’m with. For instance, the way they are lying next to me, and the lines that are being created when their body twists a certain way, the way their back curves.
It’s those things that stick out to me in my memory because I’m so drawn and attracted to the male form, and I think it’s a means of admiring the beauty of the male form from an artistic perspective.
How have the members in your community impacted your relationship with photography?
And what is the community you have forged through photographing this intimately with
people is like?
The members of my community have impacted my relationship with photography immensely. I began making work that reflected my queer identity to kind of “make up for lost time” because I felt like I was closeted for a good portion of my life, an important portion of life where I missed out on growing within the LGBTQ+ community and understanding my identity as part of that community.
I didn’t come out until after college, and honestly, I regret that so much because I think so much growing and understanding happens in your early 20s—both with yourself as well as with your sexuality. So, I personally felt like I started this process late. When I finally began to embrace my sexuality and meet people in the community, they all played a role in my understanding of my queerness, regardless of how long they were in my life.
One of my earlier bodies of work, which was the steppingstone into a lot of my current art practices, titled Would You Lie With Me, was directly about photographing scenes that served as false memories of my own. That body of work serves as a love letter to the men who I met early in my coming out, who helped me embrace myself and feel a belonging in this community. The statement that I include with that work is an open letter that I wrote—not directed to anyone specifically, but directed to all the men that I had been with or who played some role in me feeling a belonging or feeling wanted by someone for the first time in my life.
With my current work and practices, I’ve found that this way of image-making has also been a nice entry point to meeting more people within the community and finding new connections. Most of the people I photograph, I have a platonic relationship with, and I try to keep in touch with them as much as I am able to. I’ve enjoyed being able to expand my community through making these images, and I especially enjoy when I travel outside of my current city and can connect with someone in a new city who wants to connect by doing a photo session.
With most of my subjects, I also photograph myself with them, and I have begun this little collection of self-portraits with my subjects that I haven’t shown much anywhere yet but hope to do so in the future.
Some aftertastes can be bitter, while others leave us craving more. What’s the aftertaste
some of these photographs leave for you?
The aftertaste that these photographs leave is something sweet and makes me crave more. I really enjoy working with people in these intimate photo sessions and love the imagery that I’ve been able to get out of them.
So, seeing this work, I feel there’s still more to come with it, and I’m still trying out new things with lumen printing. There are things I haven’t gotten to try yet with the process, so I’m excited to see what new things come in this new year.
