Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights
In contrast to the story of Adam and Eve, in which the polarities of ‘female’ and ‘male’ are depicted as the natural order for human beings the photographs in Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights portray some of the many different gender and sexual identities that are being expressed today.
Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights puts forward that all human beings are equally natural, and that we are all ‘earthly delights’.
As a queer photographer I am visible in the project. Everyone who took part was asked if they would also like to swap places and photograph me. So I am depicted in the series, positioning myself alongside the people I photograph.
The pictures are accompanied by brief captions giving participants’ own descriptions of their gender and sexual identities. These captions reveal that gender and sexual identities are not always visible or readable, that boundaries can be fluid or flexible, and that things are not always what they seem.
There are 16 photographs in the series. The photographs were taken using negative film 2007-2010 and are printed as C-type prints. Eve, Adam, and the Garden of Earthly Delights was published for the first time in Photoworks Annual 2017 with an essay by Karin Bareman.
