José Virgilio Bermúdez

Keeping Touch is a series of medium-format photographs that illustrate my self-exploration as a transgender femme through the act of photographing both queer and non-queer individuals in an intimate way. The series is in constant dialogue with my mother, who is pictured three different ways: first, surrounded by the color blue; second, in a diptych of me and her, in which she does my make-up as she does her own; third, covered in red lips (I kissed her one-hundred times). Through these photographs, I instigate milestones in our relationship that would not have happened otherwise. The two other photographs, a cis-gender daughter and mother, and a drag queen and her boyfriend, are meant to bounce off each other, in combination with the photographs of me and my mother, in order to have a broader conversation about love, gender, and sexuality. There is no solution in my thesis, as identity is constantly in flux, and I have much more work to do. If anything, I would like my images to bring me closer to the people I photograph, and to ignite empathy in the people who see them. www.josevirgilio.com .