By Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R. We had just begun our interview when artist Ellen Priest ’77 M. Div. interrupted the conversation. “Hang on,” she said over the telephone. “I’m going to turn my music off.” “What were you listening to?” I asked Priest when she returned.
“Sophy” from Gabrielle Muller’s exhibition
While taking photo courses at the School of Art, I began photographing my friends at YDS in the Spring of 2019. I was curious about the way photography and photographs function in communal spaces, and more specifically, the way photographs shape and preserve institutional narratives. I was also studying the way shame and guilt have operated as a means of establishing and consolidating power in theological claims about gender, sexuality, and otherness. I decided to build a project that challenged the prominence of the taken-for-granted current stories told by the photographs on the walls of YDS, by centering queer visibility.