Gender Rebel
A Portrait Project by Evelyn Leder
Gender Rebel is a new photographic portrait project supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission. The project centers gender non-conforming people across a range of ages, identities, cultural backgrounds, and lived experiences. Through a series of portraits, the work celebrates GNC people not as abstractions, symbols, or social categories, but as complex individuals with presence, dignity, style, humor, vulnerability, and power.
This project grows out of my own lifelong experience as a gender non-conforming queer person. At 62, I am interested in making work that speaks to the long histories of queer and gender non-conforming people. Gender Rebel is my fourth project supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission, and continues my long-term artistic investigation into visibility, the gaze, and how bodies are seen. Much of my work has explored looking, being looked at, and the ways images frame or distort identity. This project brings that inquiry into a direct relationship with gendered life, self-presentation, and queer survival.
The portraits will be made in environments that are familiar to the people being photographed: near their homes, in their neighborhoods, in domestic spaces, work spaces, studios, yards, sidewalks, or other places where they already have a sense of presence. Rather than placing everyone into a neutral studio setup, I want the setting to hold some relationship to the person’s actual life. The photographs will be made with care, conversation, and attention to how each person inhabits their surroundings. Their stance, clothing, expression, gaze, and way of moving through the world will shape the image. I see the people I photograph not simply as subjects, but as collaborators in the making of the portrait.
The project also recognizes that gender nonconformity is not experienced the same way by everyone. GNC visibility is shaped by race, class, age, immigration history, cultural background, and the ways different bodies are policed or read in public. For that reason, the project is intentionally multigenerational and racially diverse. It asks what it means to be seen on one’s own terms, especially for people whose gender presentation has often been misunderstood, disciplined, fetishized, or erased.
The final body of work will include approximately 10–20 photographs. The project will culminate in a public exhibition at Black and White Projects in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, an opening reception, a community conversation with invited artists and cultural workers, and a closing gathering. These public events are intended to create a space of recognition, pride, and dialogue for San Francisco’s queer and gender non-conforming communities.
Gender Rebel is both a celebration and an archive. It honors people who have made lives outside conventional gender expectations, often with great creativity and courage. It also marks an important evolution in my artistic practice: a turn toward portraiture that is more connected to my own history, my community, and the political urgency of being seen without being reduced.