The Light Outside Property

Two lovers recline on a sofa, looking tenderly at one another instead of facing the camera. The room they are in is softly lit by natural light coming in through the window, creating an interplay between what is made available to see and what is present but unseen, remaining in the dark. The sunlight catches the contours of the two lovers’ faces and their metal jewelry. It alights on the curl of one of the figure's hands as it lightly caresses the other figure's head. The darkness of their clothing and the sofa, however, takes up most of the frame. The space of shadow eases distinctions between their two bodies so what normally goes unseen can emerge. Darkness, instead of light, produces a space in the photograph for their emotions to mingle and resound beyond the visually constructed boundaries of the body. Here it is not necessarily these two people as individuals that the photographer makes visible as much as it is the loving intimacy they have built together. This photograph is one in a series called “A House Is Not a Home” by photographer Laila Annmarie Stevens.

As is evident in the sense of ease these two have with the photographer, the series stemmed from Stevens's desire to photograph their friends—mostly queer, nonbinary, and trans youth of color in their hometown of New York City—in places where they feel most at home for a class ethnographic project. The project began organically with the photographer's friends, and later it evolved to include others who had learned about the project through mutual friends or Stevens's posting about the project on the Lex app and who wanted to participate. Rather than being set inside houses or apartments, however, most of the photographs were taken outside in natural light. If they are taken inside, Stevens uses only sunlight—that which comes from the outside in—to light participants. Stevens titled the series “A House Is Not a Home” to challenge the commonly held idea that a home can only exist inside the walls of a privately owned structure. In these images, which Stevens refers to as “photographic safe spaces,” queer youth have creative control over how they wish to be portrayed in the spaces they feel most at home.

In another photo, a participant in the series stands outside a beauty supply store. Their long orange nails contrast with their green, pleated, loose-fitting jeans. Their Fendi baguette-esque bag, lip gloss, layers of golden rings, necklaces, earrings, and tube top harken back to the 1990s. Varying representations of femininity echo behind them: large posters with advertisements of beauty products featuring models of color and a row of feminine mannequins peer out from the store window, checkered by reflections from the street. Kendra, the person in the photo, writes, “I chose a beauty supply store to represent what ‘home’ feels like to me. . . . In general, beauty supply stores have been a consistent safe space for me to go to where I feel secure in my identity as a black queer woman. I feel as though home is a feeling, one that presents itself wherever you feel most secure.” The camera is positioned at a lower height, giving Kendra an empowered stance above the viewer, and she meets our gaze with a look of softness and self-assuredness.

Kendra's words gesture toward the reality that the house where one lives has been and continues to be a frequent site of antagonism and unbelonging for LGBTQ+ youth. Indeed, as many public health and sociological studies have shown, LGBTQ+ youth are disproportionately overrepresented among youth who are houseless. While scholars often cite being “kicked out” as the reason for youth leaving their homes, even more often they leave their homes in an attempt to remove themselves from physical, mental, verbal, or other forms of abuse by their biological family. In “A House Is Not a Home,” Stevens chose to take photographs of youth who did have housing at the time of being photographed. Instead of focusing on youth once they become houseless, Stevens is interested in those who don't get counted in these studies; they are among the many uncounted who do not feel at home in the housing they have access to. Serving as a counterarchive to the traditional family photograph that situates children as heteronormative extensions of their parents, Stevens explores how queer and trans youth define home in their own terms.

Stevens used a Mamiya RB67 film camera to capture the images in “A House Is Not a Home.” This model of film camera first emerged in the 1800s, and by the 1990s, it had evolved into the model that Stevens used for this series. Using this camera queers linear time in that images taken almost thirty years later evoke the aesthetics and conditions of the ’90s, a period of a growing influx of queer youth into New York City who were fleeing biological families who either rejected or harmed them. When they arrived, these youth formed new models of family and meanings of home. Despite the decades that have passed since then, Stevens creates an arch of shared experience to bridge the experiences and memories of one generation to another. To Stevens, New York still feels like a haven for queer youth. Despite the vast and increasing wealth gap and extreme gentrification and displacement that characterizes present-day New York, the queer, trans, and nonbinary youth that arrived in the ’80s and ’90s shaped the networks of care—the resources and centers—that give many nonbinary, queer, and trans youth of today a sense of belonging. In these photographs Stevens taps into an intergenerational history of queer and trans home-building in the city that extends beyond private property.

As one participant put it:

Both in their writing but also as image makers, Stevens and the series's participants theorize a fluid, deeply loving, and adaptable version of home that does not depend on the walls of private property to exist. In fact, it exceeds and troubles not only the walls of a house, apartment, or room, but also the constraints a culture so thoroughly shaped by private property and its heteronormative mandates has placed on who deserves love. Here, they shape experimental meanings of home and the love, care, and intimacy that “home” implies.

“A House Is Not a Home” is also a study in the colors and tones of skin under natural light. Like the light-sensitive paper of a photograph, melanated skin responds and attunes with sunlight; in this series, Stevens foregrounds that visual relationship to invite viewers to consider this intimacy between the sun and those who have more melanin as significant. The sun also has the power to transgress barriers that mark boundaries between inside and outside. In these photographs of queer, nonbinary, and trans youth of color, these two seemingly disparate thematics come together: those whose skin resonates most with the sun are also troubling norms that white patriarchal property culture has deemed to be natural, especially those who are allowed to experience “home.”

As with the photograph of the person standing in the park, most of the photographs in the series were taken outdoors in what photographers often refer to as “natural light.” This carries both technical and epistemological weight. Visual and textual discourses concerning “nature” and the “natural” have a robust history of capturing queer, nonbinary, and trans folks—especially those of color—as deviant and unnatural. Using solely natural light to frame these youth challenges this history. Rather than turning to logics of inclusion to stage this challenge, as photographs of queer couples with their biological offspring tend to do (i.e., “We're families, too!”), Stevens's use of sunlight engages this discourse from another angle by creating a visual tension. The tension that Stevens plays with throughout the series exists in their use of sunlight to frame participants while reducing highlights (also called “flattening”) in the images during the editing process. Sunlight is known for its ability to dramatize human figures, and photographers often use sunlight to make their subjects stand out from the background, which tends to generate a sublime distinguishing effect that pits the human against their surroundings. Stevens works exclusively with natural light, yet during the editing process, they flatten the images, which reduces the drama and sublime aesthetic and instead disperses the light over the entirety of the scene. Here, queer youth and their surroundings exist on the same plane. Nature is not assumed to be a stable, unchanging universal used to validate or uphold the participants’ existence. In “A House Is Not a Home,” backgrounds, people, settings, and sunlight collaborate and play off of one another, cocreating each other. Here, queer youth simply exist with ease in the places they call home, in harmony with the elements around them.

While most of these images are of youth outside, they still invite complexity regarding queer youth's proximity to and situatedness within houses. The last image in this series chosen for this gallery is one actually taken inside the house where none of the youth participants lives with their family. The composition falls neatly into the rule of thirds: in the bottom third, the youth is sitting on the couch, their face framed by tendrils of an artificial bouquet. Sunlight seeps into the room through blinds in the middle third, with the outline of a lampshade centered above the youth's head. The upper third shows a print of a painting portraying the story of Jesus healing a blind man. Metaphors around light, sight, unseeing, the natural, the supernatural, and the artificial reverberate around this photograph. In a conversation about this photograph, Stevens told me that this participant lives with her parents, who are very religious and have not accepted her queer identity. Yet, she chooses to live with them and care for them, and she maintains a Christian religious practice herself. The image asks us to linger in seemingly opposing forces: the confinement of the home signified by the barlike presence of the blinds’ shadows on the wall, and the sunlight nonetheless entering between the blinds and alighting upon her face. If we cannot always find home inside a house, we cannot always find it outside either. Rather, Stevens provides a visual meditation on a version of home this participant has defined through her choices, one that exists in the porous space of the spiritual, the emotional, and the relational—one that they ask us to bear witness to.

All photographs in the gallery were taken by Laila Annmarie Stevens as part of their 2019–2022 documentary project “A House is Not a Home.” The scanned notebook pages were written by the participants pictured on the opposing page.