Drag / Strip

• Prize
  Gold in Portraiture/Culture
• Photographer
  Tom Zimberoff, United States
• Date of Photograph
  2024
• Website
  https://www.zimberoff.com

Drag is a performance art employing spectacular costumes, theatrical storytelling, and actors who blur gender distinction—kind of like kabuki.

Diptychs of drag queens, queer and trans folks literally stripped of bawdy stage caricature yet brimming with personal character, allow us to witness their authentic yet vulnerable selves with the reductive drama of black-and-white, juxtaposed with their colorful burlesque costumes. The effect is not before-and-after, but a dialogue between artifice and authenticity.

Kabuki fixes roles in tradition; drag dissolves them as endlessly fluid performances.

Zimberoff is an American photographer shaped by the last great era of print magazines and a renewed contemporary practice. Classically trained as a musician, he pivoted from clarinet to camera and, with the Sygma Photo Agency, covered hundreds of historical and breaking news stories worldwide. After a long hiatus, he returned to photography with a sharpened focus on portraiture and cultural memory. His career archive is housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin. AHis prints are included in a number of museums and private colections. He lives and works in San Francisco.

Awards a bunch