Photography Series Aims to Empower Alaska Native LGBTQ2 Community
Photographer Jenny Miller was moved to create Continuous by the struggles that she had growing up and coming out, the lack of accessible queer indigenous role models, and the need for healing of indigenous communities through decolonization.
Miller is a gay, Two-Spirit photographer. She grew up in Nome and Fairbanks, and currently lives with her girlfriend in Anchorage. Miller understands herself as an amalgamation of her parents’ feminine and masculine qualities. “I think I have a perfect mesh of my mother and my father. And I express them equally, in a way.”
Continuous began to take shape in 2012, while Miller was studying Photomedia and American Indian studies at the University of Washington. Miller was inspired by a class that featured indigenous people who identified as LGBTQ and Two-Spirit, and discussed indigenous gender roles, which are generally understood to have been less rigid than those instituted by colonizers.
Miller realized that the indigenous queer community needed to be more visible, to provide strength to, and role models for, indigenous people who did not yet know who they were.
Read More at Alaska Commons
Jenny Miller received a 2016 Annual Humanities Grant for her project, “Continuous,”** a photographic portraiture series documenting the experiences of Alaska Native LGBTQ | Two-Spirit peoples from distinct tribal backgrounds. The photographs, accompanied by short personal stories, written by the highlighted subjects, will explore what it means to be Alaska Native LGBTQ | Two-Spirit, celebrate individual and cultural identity, and engage viewers in an educational dialogue. Ms. Miller calls both Nome and Fairbanks home, though her mother’s Iñupiaq heritage connects her to Wales, Alaska as well. Drawn to photography from a young age, Ms. Miller graduated from the University of Washington with a BFA in Photomedia and a BA in American Indian Studies.
Read More at Alaska Humanities Forum
**The project was first titled Shapeshifters, which Miller hoped would evoke spiritual changes, people shifting between binary gender roles, moving to fulfill their individual desires, and adapting as they figure out who they are and how they want to move through the world.As the project matured, Miller realized that the title did not work
Jenny also came out in an article in Alaska Dispatch News several months before her portrait series was displayed. Read that article here.
There are currently a total of 17 portraits/stories being displayed at The Alaska Humanities Forum in Anchorage till February 7th.