BRANDON
PHOTO BY RANDY BACON
BRANDON
“I Ask to Evolve”
When I lived in New York City, I worked for a company doing a boring corporate job that allowed me to live a semi-comfortable lifestyle. It was July 2013 when I was diagnosed with HIV and it devastated me, causing a shift in my perspective and direction. Between growing up deaf and queer (which took me years to acclamate to,) this new diagnosis made me want to center my life around creating practices that fulfill me in deeper, more holistic ways. I was moved to start fresh, so I took some time to heal and I decided to become a yoga teacher for the deaf community. I wanted to pay forward this new gift of yoga that had helped me get through my recent struggles grappling with HIV.
I quit my job and cashed out my 401k to apply to the only yoga teacher training in the country that advertised a translator for any deaf students. I trained at home for months in preparation. The day before I was supposed to go I received an email saying that the facility did not have enough interpreters for the students, and I could only come if I could manage to find and afford my own translator within the next day. In an effort to salvage all of my efforts and hopes, I used my money to invest in a camera (photography being another passion of mine) to begin documenting and depicting my life through my own lens.
Living with a hearing impairment has really heightened my sight as a professional photographer. I got into photography because I felt like it was the best way for me to get in touch with people. It requires you to be face to face and to become comfortable with a subject before you start shooting. I really have to become connected, and I had never had that type of experience before.
I moved to Los Angeles, and I am now creating and shooting more projects focused on bringing exposure and awareness to my community. I think that being deaf has helped hone my “eye,” since I have the ability to turn off all sound when I take off my cochlear implant. There is no sound to photos, so it feels more like an even playing field. It comes with it’s resistance too, as it amplifies my thoughts, and sometimes the thoughts are too loud for me to focus. This is where yoga and meditation come in handy. In the end, I want to be able to fuse all of these cultivated practices together and share these gifts with the people that need it the most, and that is the mission I am dedicated to.
My intention is to share what I see in the world, the natural beauty of all things from the ordinary to the profound. Photography is my practice of gratitude when my words are difficult to reign in, and the voices all drown each other out. It's a visual prayer. I ask to confront our hope, our fear, our shame, our vulnerability, our true untainted love. I ask to evolve.
I generally aim to shine a light on topics that have personally hindered my life and the life of other people like me. As a child, I wanted to be a ballet dancer but my father would never have let me, due to his fear that I wouldn’t be accepted. I know many queer men that experienced similar circumstances, so I created a series of work focused on readressing the identity of masculinity.
Another topic I explore is shame around the nude body. I was wanting to find a way to make my subjects more comfortable shooting nude to show them the beauty that
I saw. I began building these origami masks to offer a sense of anonymity and in the process, it gave the subjects a kind of alter ego, and the photos told a whole new story. The masked photo series was one of my first experiments and it proved to me that a photoshoot could be used in various ways to learn through connection by exploring taboos in order to break stigmas, connect me to my community (which can sometimes be a challenge with my hearing), and even foster a space for healing when the intention is there.
My advice for those who are not able to hear would be to try and ignore the surrounding noise and really focus on being in the present and hearing your own inner voice guide you. It’s not easy, but it’s like riding a bicycle, keep riding until you get good at it.