lara
lara was the first queer portrait
i got to shoot in seoul.
she filled out the booking form (in an extensive form my virgo heart really appreciated by the way) while she was still in germany, getting ready to go on her dream trip to korea for two weeks.
some highlights from what she told me right from the start:
the colors that represent her the most are yellow and green.
we talked about a very common experience for queer people, specially women, when we don't feel valid both in society and within ourselves: this looming impostor syndrome that many academics have studied and labeled as comphet but way more people just feel it and struggle with it, regardless of name.
it delays our personal journey of coming out and makes us feel incomplete, as if we're not queer enough, unless we have checked some arbitrary boxes or reached a certain number of romantic and/or sexual experiences...
as if our own knowledge of ourselves wasn't enough. always trying to follow heteronormative patterns and rules that simply were not made for us and don't fit us.
"i grew up in a very accepting environment so there really were no issues when it came to coming out. the struggles i faced were more about not feeling valid as a queer person because i had no 'hard evidence', no experiences to base anything on, but i've been trying to remind myself that i know how i feel and that that is what my identity is based on. i also live in a small city where there really aren't any queer spaces to meet queer people so finding a community was hard. i think that's why my 'mindset' also comes a little bit from trying to validate my identity in front of the straight people around me."
(queer? lesbian?...)
"i guess that's also something i can tell you about myself. dance was a huge part of my life (and it still is, just not as much as it used to be). i have a disorder of the vestibular nervous system which means i have a very bad sense of direction and balance so my parents got me into dance at a very young age, my daycare/kindergarten was part of a dance school as well. i did ballet for 10 years and got into hiphop which i ended up doing competitively in a dance crew for about four years."
the song that represents her the most is
'treat people with kindness' by harry styles (or, might i add, any ateez song)
"i feel like i have two very different sides to myself. one that loves the big city, big crowds, loud concerts, always being able to jump from one crazy experience to the next and the other one that just wants to live in a cabin in the woods, cook delicious vegan food and read books all day. they both feel very much like the true me.
although i feel very alive whenever the sun is out during the middle of the day, that rarely happens in germany, so i think the year-round answer would be at night. i feel most alive when most of the world around me is asleep.
sometimes that means staying up until 3 am to study a language undisturbed, sometimes it means getting up at 5 am to have time for an extensive morning routine with a great breakfast, yoga and a walk."
after all the talking, me and lara actually met in person and became friends really fast and really easily. what were supposed to be two weeks in korea… turned into two months and so so many memories.
since we had more time, we delayed the photoshoot until one of her last days in seoul and sat down again to rethink about what we wanted to represent in these photos and the answer was very obvious to both of us.
lara came to korea wanting to get some time away from her "real life"
some time that was fully and 100% just dedicated to herself.
seoul is such an incredibly fast city that it is very easy to just get lost in all the lights - you soon start moving at the city's speed
and everything and everyone around you becomes blurry until all you have are glimpses that feel more like memories of those lights and smells and all the sounds...
but being invisible in the middle of it all allows you to just focus on yourself more than we've both ever experienced
anywhere else in the world.
and with so much happening and so many people getting in and out your life all the time, two months in seoul feel like half a year (at least).
lara got to experience everything she wanted to experience here and way more. so when the day of the photoshoot finally arrived, we went to the center of it all and made visual eternal memories of all the growth that somehow happened in such a crazy, ratchet but amazing place that is hongdae.
mostly, we wanted to capture and remember the exercise of letting go we attempted to do all summer: letting go of overthinking, of expectations, of insecurities, of trauma responses, of fear, of shame, of self sabotaging...
we didn't exactly succeed in just two months, but we did do a lot,
and i got so lucky to have made a friend out of it all.
