Loren Cameron

Loren Rex Cameron
Born 1959
Pasadena, California, United States
Occupation Photographer, author, visual artist

Loren Rex Cameron (born 1959) is an American photographer, author and transsexual activist. His work includes portraiture and self-portraiture which consist of lesbian and transsexual bodies in both clothed and nude form. Cameron's photography captures images of the transsexual body. The Advocate in an early review of Cameron's work said he was deserving of "high praise not only for compelling quality of his black-and-white images but for their sensitivity as well."[1]

Biography

Loren Rex Cameron was born in Pasadena, California in 1959. He moved to rural Arkansas in 1969 after his mother's death, where he lived as a self-described tomboy on his father's farm. By the age of sixteen, Cameron identified both sexually and socially as a lesbian and encountered homophobic hostility in the small town where he lived. At this time, Cameron quit school and left his home to travel the country seeking work as a construction laborer and other blue collar employment. In 1979, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he identified socially with the lesbian community until the age of twenty-six, when he confronted his dissatisfaction with the female body with which he was born. Cameron's interest in photography coincided with the beginning of his physical changes as he documented his own physiological transition from female to male at this time. Despite his lack of formal training, beginning in 1993 Cameron studied the rudiments of photography and began to compassionately photograph the transsexual community. Since 1994, he has given lectures on his work at universities, educational conferences and art institutes. By 1995, Cameron's photographs had been shown in solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Minneapolis, a Los Angeles.

Works

Cameron's photography and writing was first published by Cleis Press in 1996. Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits, documented Cameron's personal experience of transition from female to male, his life as a man, and the everyday lives of transmen he knew. Body Alchemy was received with much positive acclaim and became a double 1996 Lambda Literary Award winner. It remains his most well-known work to date, though he has since published other photographic works.

Cameron's images have been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, in Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in Mexico City, Mexico. They have been published in numerous books such as Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg, 1996) and Constructing Masculinity: Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 1995), as well as in various magazines.[2] He has also posed for photographers such as Daniel Nicoletta, Amy Arbus, and Howard Shatz.

Cameron lectures throughout the United States at universities and other venues, including Smith College, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, Penn State, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In May 2008, Cameron presented his work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. On television, he has been profiled on the Discovery Health Channel's LGBT-themed one-hour special Sex Change: Him to Her, on the National Geographic Channel's "Taboo" Sexual Identity" series. He has also been interviewed in the magazine, The New Yorker.[2][3] Cameron's photographs document the lives and bodies of both transsexual men and women, providing positive, beautiful images of transgender people. His first published works (Body Alchemy and Man Tool: The Nuts and Bolts of Female-to-Male Surgery) consists largely of self-portraits, FTM body modifications, and portraits of other female to male transsexuals. More recently published work is a diverse and unprecedented representation of both female and male transsexuals, portraits and classical nudes (Body Photographs by Loren Cameron Volume 1 and 2, and Cameron Correspondence 1997-2003, Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados 2003).

A current photographic project focuses on the sexuality of gay FTMs.

Awards, honors, and recognitions

Works

Books

Selected films

Film and television (a partial list):

Notes

  1. ↑ Publishing, Here (November 12, 1996). "Reviews". The Advocate: 79.
  2. 1 2 Selected Résumé, Online Alchemy, January 27, 2007
  3. ↑ Presentations, Online Alchemy, January 27, 2007

Sources

All biographical information is taken from Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits and the biography section of Online Alchemy as of November 11, 2008.

Further reading

Articles about Cameron and reviews of work:

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