Midwest LGBTQ+ photographers and videographers work to preserve LGBTQ+ identities

The morning of March 22, Atlas Photography posted an inquiry on its Facebook searching for “trans Hoosiers” to participate in a photography project in honor of Transgender Day of Visibility.

Sam McCollum, a Muncie native, is the trans man behind the page and project. Although McCollum works as a crisis services coordinator with Mental Health America of Indiana, he has been practicing photography since college.
He said his initial goal for the project was to reach a handful of people in Muncie and empower them for free — a gesture he said is only partially common.

“I’ve found that there wasn’t a lot of opportunities for showcasing visibility,” McCollum said. “In Indiana, it’s hard to showcase this part of you … You don’t see a lot of representation for trans people.”

McCollum said he was blown away by the response to his project. His initial hope to reach a handful of people in the community was easily met as he received responses from people all over East-Central Indiana.

In a surgical binder recovering from top surgery — and only a month after the initial post —  McCollum was still planning photoshoots to fulfill incoming participation requests.

“When I took [participants] pictures and I could show it back to them, a lot of them were like, ‘Wow, I usually don’t feel good about pictures of myself, I usually don’t take a lot of pictures’ or ‘I love how you made me look in this picture,’” he said.

This level of excitement and comfort he felt between him and his subjects is not commonly experienced by trans people. He said that photography and videography of trans people have always been few and far between throughout history — another reason why this project was so important to him.

“A lot of our history’s erased … There isn’t a lot of photographic evidence,” McCollum said. “This is proof we exist, and we’re here; we’ve always been here, and we’re going to stay here.”

According to Stonewall, images and videos of transgender people, and the LGBTQ+ community in general, have commonly been erased from history. LGBTQ+ photographers and videographers across the Midwest, like McCollum, are working to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself.

Muncie native and videographer Ray Replogle grew up in an anti-LGBTQ+ environment but found a home in Muncie’s/Ball State University’s large LGBTQ+ community. Replogle began their business by creating primarily promotional videos for Muncie Civic Theatre and other nonprofits and small businesses.

After a while, Replogle was asked to shoot a wedding for someone they knew, a first for them. They continued to book weddings, and eventually, Replogle was asked to shoot their first LGBTQ+ wedding, something they described as “a game changer.”

“It was so radically different than these ‘honky-tonk’ barn weddings I was doing,” Replogle said. “I started bringing my queer identity more into the forefront of my business and began just being louder about being gay. I started getting more queer clients because of that, and it all kind of snowballed.”

This “snowball” effect took them across the country and led them to film all but one LGBTQ+ wedding last year.

Replogle has learned there is a huge need for videography in the wedding industry. When it comes to LGBTQ+ vendors or those who center sexual identity in their wedding experience, they said they’re almost one’s only choice.

“Videography has always been evil and been a weapon of white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy. So, as a trans person, just making videos at all, I think there’s an incredible sort of active resistance in that,” they said.

Indiana wedding and portrait photographer Jasmine Tafoya echoed Replogle, similarly recognizing the importance of her identity within her business.

“It’s really rewarding to just see that there are a lot of us out here who are ready to work with you,” she said. “You deserve to have options, you deserve to have people who are loudly supporting you — people also who are loud about themselves.”

Tafoya started her business 10 years ago and centers her work around making her clients comfortable. She said this starts at the very beginning of her interactions with clients by providing inclusive intake forms.

This practice simultaneously helps break down the gendered and stereotypical “bride and groom” branding within the wedding industry. She said regardless of the strides being made within the industry, there is still active resistance.

“The hardest part is when it’s with weddings and there [are] people that are around them that maybe don’t have those same values,” she said. “Sometimes the people that they know and love are so visibly uncomfortable with the fact that my second photographer is my wife.”

At the end of the day, she recognizes that her photography work is important and allows her to continue to be a storyteller for her clients.

“The people who are hiring me are hiring me because of who I am, whether that be because I’m queer or because I’m a woman or because of the way that I view the world,” she said. “It’s really empowering to get to work with so many folks of the queer community.”

Recent Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) graduate, and current Chicagoland area photographer Sage Look, said they have a similar outlook on their own work.

After a 2023 SCAD student photoshoot began to spread harmful anti-trans rhetoric, Look, a trans person, was one of the first people to openly speak out against the shoot. The photoshoot, posted to Instagram, featured an individual who detransitioned with a caption that spoke on medical transitions being “harmful” to “thousands of youth.”

While Look’s speaking out against the photoshoot was praised by their peers and members of the LGBTQ+ community, it garnered equal hate online.

“It’s really sad that I have gotten very used to being misgendered online, especially because people like to weaponize my own identity against me in a lot of ways,” they said.

After enduring hate for days, SCAD reached out to Look directly and asked them to have a spotlight on the school’s official Instagram page.

“I feel like there’s a target on my back. I’ve always felt that, but I feel it’s ramped up in the last few years, in a way of anti-trans violence — it’s been weaponized,” Look said. “It felt so good to realize that I did have a community that supported me, that loved my art — my trans art and my queer art — for what it is. That felt really special.”

Even with the difficulties they face in terms of being able to create LGBTQ+ art, they said that, though it sounds cheesy, having their job is all they ever wanted.

“I have such a deep love of people, especially the queer community, that it’s just really important to me to showcase queerness in a way that is really colorful, bold [and] larger than life,” Look said. “I want to force people to acknowledge queerness for what it is, and that queerness can be beautiful, that queerness is strange — but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.”

Contact Trinity Rea via email at [email protected] or on X @thetrinityrea.