Artist Camille Trautman's The North American LCD no. 15 (2024) is on view at the Frye as part of the Boren Banner Series through April 12, 2026. In this post, they reflect on their process and inspirations that lead to The North American LCD series and works in their exhibition.
During my summer break in grad school last year, I went on a vacation with a couple of my trans friends, staying all together in a cabin at Sun Lakes, in Eastern Washington. Around sunset on a windy night, I decided to go do a photoshoot by one of the lakes. I wanted to show myself by the lake but instead of looking at my reflection, I would gaze at the LCD screen, not the lake. I placed the TV inches from the edge of the lake and stuck my foot in the water. I shook my head during the long exposure to obscure my face, my identity. Despite it growing increasingly windy to the point where I grew concerned the tripod would be tipped over, I was able to load up the car without any equipment getting damaged.
In the past, immediately after a photoshoot, I frequently would think the images must be terrible. Seeing the images on the screen come up, I felt excited and proud. It was the first time I had felt so confident after a photoshoot. This photoshoot would be the direction I would continue in for the rest of the works seen in the Frye show. Shooting at dusk so the light from the LCD screen illuminated my body and including a view of the lush, vegetated landscape became key elements of the series.
A couple weeks later I went to see the film I Saw the TV Glow and cried and cried afterward. Seeing a film that had parallels with my own work encouraged me to keep going.
For the Boren Banner image, The North American LCD no. 15, I shot it near Boeing Creek, creating a seemingly natural landscape in suburbia. Even after I returned to Arizona to complete my MFA, I would travel up in the mountains to find more vegetated and verdant places for my shoots.
Nearly a year before I shot the images in the show, I first began with an old TV that I wanted to use in a photoshoot where I would photograph and re-photograph with the image of the background on the TV screen. I was also trying to use my own nude figure and trying to make it look more androgynous. I used a blanket to partially cover or veil my body, as I was still nervous about doing nude self-portraits. I was interrupting the landscape by making visible the moiré interference patterns on the screen.
At first, I was mainly shooting during the day or early evening and the reflections on the TV screen made it difficult for viewers to understand. It was suggested to me in my MFA program that I purchase a portable battery so that I could be free to have photoshoots in natural looking landscapes with the TV, such as Saguaro National Park. These images were not quite working for me either, I didn’t think there was quite enough risk with my self-portraits in these stark landscapes.
At one point early on I tried using other subjects with the screens. The result was a bit unsettling and disturbing, which was not the message I wanted. As to my performance in these images, I am contorting and shaping my own body to fit across the frame. I do not feel like this performance is something I could ask of someone else, especially in more forested places. It is a physically intense process; there are insects, dirt, mud, thorns, water, and snow all on my body at the same time.
By late last year I knew I wanted to create a video for this series but was not sure of the direction. Mark McKnight’s show at the Whitney seemed to be on a similar track to what I was interested in. His work places queer bodies in the desert landscape, being both erotic and having a haunting sense of death, a memento mori. Seeing this in January gave me the push I needed to complete the performance and video this spring. I have felt anger and distress at how I could possibly fit into my own body. The LCD screens for me provided an escape from embodied life.
I had previously in 2023 created a video, Criminal Professions where I referenced and subverted the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 from British India. This was my first experiment in creating transfeminine art, as I had only been out for slightly less than a year. Jules Gill Peterson in her 2024 book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, writes of the trans panic that “traces of its emergence are archived in the North-Western Provinces of colonial India.” I wanted to focus on subverting the colonial history of transphobia. As Peterson writes, “Trans misogyny formed first as mode of colonial statecraft.” My own work is meant to point towards how this colonial statecraft has shaped my own identity and my uncomfortable relation to the colonized landscape of this country where I grew up.
Another influential experience was looking through many historical archives as an archival producer for a documentary on Indigenous salmon fishing in the PNW was quite revealing. The director asked to have images showing what life was like before colonial influence. I struggled with this, especially in late-19th-century photography, when often, if the people living in a particular place had access to photography, they also likely had access to western-style factory-made clothing. Meaning that an image where they would not be wearing that sort of clothing was likely staged, or else wearing regalia that was not worn in everyday life. What photographers such as Edward S Curtis were doing was definitionally not Orientalist photography, yet it bears more resemblance to that than some of the images from the same time period I saw of diverse groups of people working in Pacific Northwest canneries. There is never one perspective or moment that is truly accurate, so there should not be one clear time or perspective in my images, either.
Ultimately, my biggest hope for the exhibit is that viewers think about their relationship to their gender and their own bodies.