Neville Caulfield, Thoroughfare, 1/20, 2024, Inkjet print, $500.

"Before I depart I rest my body in the place the lighthouse misses, the dark swaths of grass (missed too by the man who mows the lawn every other Wednesday) on the slope of the small hill behind the keeper’s house. This place is made darker still as the eyes adjust unwillingly to the circle of light that sprints along the tops of the black pines that crown the hill, anointing each for just a moment; tonight I pick You. I pick you, and then you and then you, and then you and then you and then you. The only thing I can hear is the quiet squeal of the island’s generator a hundred yards away, the gears working slowly, smallest to largest, pulling a swath of indigo cotton across the sky inch by inch, the stars and their small sounds curled in the dark spaces between the bayberry leaves."

Since childhood I have been aware of enacting a metered version of my sexuality, and thus myself, in order to feel safe, to fit in, to be invisible, to be seen. There are apparitions of identity that surface, often unwillingly, to satisfy these situations, never complete, always lacking complete self-consciousness. My practice of making self-portraits is an attempt to remedy this crisis by creating fixed, intentional, indisputably real images of myself, bared in light and gelatin silver. 

When making pictures I draw on histories that are simultaneously mine and not mine: Masculinity, genealogy, the earth and the church. I dislodge and queer the tradition of large format film photography through dramatized pose, light, and composition to tell a much different but not altogether disconnected history, often a strenuous yet lonely process, something solitary and nearly silent. My sexual expression clings to my heels like a hastily stitched on shadow. God becomes a poltergeist. The parenthesis of my thoughts open and close like gills." -N.C.