Ryan Pfluger Is Holding Space for His Community

In early 2020, as the world locked down, the photographer Ryan Pfluger decided to embark on a monumental project. Years in the planning, he began work on the series that would become his new book, Holding Space: Life and Love Through a Queer Lens, a collection showcasing the stories of one hundred queer, interracial couples from across the country through a combination of intimate photographs and excerpts from interviews with each. "This was the time to be making work like this. I knew I wanted to photograph interracial, queer couples and have conversations about intimacy and connection that would somehow be integrated into the photographs," he explains of the book, which is out tomorrow and includes a foreword by the director Janicza Bravo and an essay by the actor Brandon Kyle Goodman. "It felt like the right body of work to engage in the process this way, for the core of my ethics to meet the core of my artistic voice."

Pfluger cast a wide net in his call for couples to participate, planning continent-wide road trips to capture the vast breadth of America's queer community. He also offered his subjects an agency that can be regrettably rare in photography, allowing each couple to decide where they were shot, how they posed, what they wore, and even which image would eventually be published. "Photographers often have very thought-out plans when going into a session and I approached this very differently," he explains. "A safe and collaborative space needed to be created where the couples could always feel in control of their narrative."

The subjects are given the room to speak for themselves as well in the texts accompanying each image, which often touch on difficult issues like identity, privilege, and systemic injustice. "Historically, it's just a factual statement that cis, straight, white men have embedded themselves within communities that are not their own to create work. They then receive accolades and profit from those communities, while the voices of those communities are often met with silence or gatekeeping," Pfluger adds. "I've always found it strange that so rarely do we have accounts from the people in the photographs. It's always about the artist and their intention, while the subjects themselves may feel used, mischaracterized, or tokenized for the sake of art."

In celebrating these couples who live at the intersection of various marginalized identities, Pfluger is not only holding space but actively creating it for underrepresented voices. "For the queers, this really is my love letter to the community, that they can have something in their home that shows the vastness of our love but also the messiness that comes with being queer and being in an interracial couple," says the photographer from personal experience. "Queer people are constantly being policed, our bodies are politicized, and who we love is questioned. This book is not only about who we love, but how we love—what we go through, how much we have to unlearn, and how radical it still is to be publicly queer. I think cisgender, straight, white humans have a lot to learn from us and if this book changes the way a few of them think about things, I can rest a little easier at night."

Holding Space is out tomorrow. Read this story and many more in print by preordering our fifth issue here.

Please join us in conversation with Pfluger and Janicza Bravo this Saturday, November 12, at the West Hollywood Edition. Email rsvp@ceromagazine.com for details.

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