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Nikki Smith
Newer Topographics
These images are a recent development from a long term ongoing trans-gendered self-portraiture series. They were inspired by Steidl's publication earlier this year of 'New Topographics' which reproduced the work from the original 1975 Rochester, NY show which I have always been a long-time fan of. Identity projects usually refer to Cindy Sherman but as a fifty year old male I am more inspired by Lewis Baltz!
(Steidl 2010)
I learned to draw paths in Photoshop to be able to initially montage myself into various B&W landscapes taken from this book before deciding to photograph local locations myself to use as backdrops. These are usually masculine spaces, whether from obsolete old heavy industry or newer cheaply regenerated workshop-type units, which seem to me charged either with a sense of collapse or irrelevance - and contrasting with my own recent need to switch to a feminised self. Trash magazine tropes of female availability and passivity which I adopt in my clothing and pose concedes that in an 'evolving' world a disorientated move from one (out of date) socio-culturally imposed form of identity to another is perhaps a misguided attempt to achieve psychological emancipation.
Nikki attended the three year 'creative photography' course in the late 70s at Nottingham Trent
University (then known as Trent Polytechnic).
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