The Glitzy Glamour Glitter Girls: Drag Queens, Visual Ethnography and the Ciné Photo-essay

Abstract

The central argument of the project The Glitzy Glamour Glitter Girls: Drag Queens,Visual Ethnography and the Ciné Photo-essay is that visual and cinematic essays created by artists can operate as a form of visual ethnography. The project, therefore, broadens social understandings of subcultures. The aim is to photograph and film a specific group of drag queens, following their lives and ideas over a 20-year period. The traditional approach of anthropology includes a historical distrust of the visual as scientific data. Within this research project, the practice and boundaries of visual ethnography will be mapped in the friction and fissures created from the intersection of art and social science in practice-led research. The research expands the classifications within the practice and theory of visual ethnography from the distinct genres of photography and film in visual research to include a new hybrid visual form that I designate as ciné moments and the ciné photo-essay. The project uses the archival material of a black-and-white photographic essay captured by the photographer turned filmmaker/researcher as a catalyst to create a new body of work using still and moving images. The research project rememorialisesphotographs taken in The Laneway, which is actually a series of laneways off Hill Street in Surry Hills in Sydney, Australia, during public street parties after gay and lesbian events such as Mardi Gras and Sleaze Ball. The original photographs depict three drag queens, known as the Glitzy Glamour Glitter Girls, and street culture that has disappeared. The photo-essay is an under-theorised subject area within the trajectory of documentary history, according to theorists Timothy Corrigan in The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (2011) and Philippe Mather in Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine: Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism and Film (2013). The photo-essay, a series of still photographs that creates a narrative or statement, has been historically tied to print media and photojournalism. The demise of traditional print outlets in the media and the proliferation of online slideshows through the internet have created new horizons for the photo-essay to expand. This project will explore the still and moving essayistic in visual media to find the gaps and overlaps between the traditional and experimental aspects of visual ethnography. Lens-based visual artists and anthropologists Sarah Pink, Trinh T. Minh Ha and Anna Grimshaw expand the margins of the visual within the trajectory of ethnography and methodology. The Glitzy Glamour Glitter Girls: Drag Queens, Visual Ethnography and the Ciné Photo-essay weaves still and moving images into a hybrid form that lifts the mask off a subculture of drag queens in Sydney. The PhD thesis comprises an installed exhibition of still and moving images as a film projection (in an art gallery space) and an exegetical document of 50,000 words that will explicate the methodological process and disciplinary context of the research.