This portrait is of the drag artist C&A who I photographed on New Years Day 2017. It was taken at The Northcote pub in Leyton, a venue that hosts a popular weekly drag night.

I have long been interested in photographing this strand of live entertainment dating back to the late 80’s when I photographed drag artists in a now, long forgotten East End of London before gentrification. This current work effectively revisits the same subject matter but now over two decades later.

Many of my photographic projects originate from a starting point of trying to examine the façade that we present to the world. Whether that is as a persona we project to aid performance in front of others, or as a barrier to protect our inner selves.

When I started this project, I had a vague idea that it would be a simple two-step photography process to represent the ideas; capturing the before and the after when the acts were in full drag. By chance my first shoot was a charity event featuring several different acts. One of these acts, C&A, was already partly made up. At the time taking these photographs of her didn’t seem to fit in with my initial overall vision, but when I later reviewed those images several days later I saw an image where the everyday male identity intersected with the extravagant female persona. This seemed a rather more relevant and perhaps telling aspect of what I was trying to portray in documenting the world of drag artists.

The portrait above is from a recent session where I photographed C&A. I find that these recurring encounters increasingly help to define and shape what I am hoping to achieve, and perhaps also signal change in my approach both technically and creatively.