Dream Boy

Dream Boy is a project that's about fantasy, perception, and control. It began with the simple thought I kept having when I would look at someone for too long: “I can see you as a ____”. That blank became my starting point. In a couple of weeks, I turned a Columbia architecture grad student into a fighter and a construction worker. An aspiring actor became a finance bro. Three roommates from Boulder, Colorado, became a skater, a businessman, and a country boy. A prep cook from the south, visiting New York, was transformed into my depiction of a southern man. A California-born and raised creative became a soldier. A boy who studies Jewish humor became a sailor. A Henry became a Tom. A surfer from Vermont became a 70s heartthrob. A Columbia grad working in tech turned into a stay-at-home boyfriend. And an amazing photographer from Japan as a performative artist. 

None of these roles are real or accurate to the person they are. They’re imagined, posed, and heavily styled by me. I don't usually photograph men, so Dream Boy became a way to ease into something rather uncomfortable. Directing them felt strange at first, almost invasive. I wasn't used to that kind of authority with my work. But in constructing these characters, I was able to use fictional characters as a way of revealing bits of the truth. Creating distance through this performance helped me get closer to what I actually wanted to see. 

For this project, I downloaded Hinge. In my bio, I wrote that I was not looking for a relationship, but for models for my project that were available within the next week. From Hinge came two models for this project, the soldier and the stay-at-home boyfriend. I went to a stranger's house the same day as matching with him, and the other, I met outside at Washington Square Park. Three of the models were classmates I had observed all of class before coming up to them with a prompt and a time. One of them was a boy whom I had never met that I had messaged on Instagram, and the other was a guy I met that day of as a friend of a friend. I cut his hair after the photoshoot. Even when they were styled as someone completely different from themselves, they stepped into the roles naturally. There was a level of freedom to it. They weren't performing masculinity as themselves, but as a version I had made for them that same day. The act of pretending seemed to make them more at ease in front of the camera.

Dream Boy became a balance between discomfort and curiosity, between direction and collaboration. It taught me that sometimes the best way to understand people is through the fiction we build around them. These boys, my “Dream Boys”, aren't who they are; they're who I made them to be. And through that, I learned as much about my own gaze as I did about their willingness to be seen.