Artist Feature: Kenny Lemes
Kenny Lemes is a self taught Cuban photographer born in Havana, now currently working and living in Buenos Aires. Lemes have had two individual exhibitions and his work is part of private and public art collections.
Photo by Kenny Lemes
Q: Can you share something you've learned from creating this body of work that would resonate with our community?
K: My work aims to make world’s appear. Our society has been trapped for many years in a binary system of opinion, and this binarism has also conditioned our way of seeing things: everything that does not fit into the hegemonic category of beauty is easily catalogued as "ugly". My work focuses on a shift of this binarism and proposes a much more varied and real palette of what is a beautiful body, worthy of being photographed, which deserves the same love and the same affective care as any other. Expanding the gaze on bodies is a very important political act, one discovers the potency of existing, proudly, on the edges of hetero-patriarchal thinking. When I say that I like to think of my work as "making worlds appear" I mean that there is not just one world where we are all equal. There are infinite little worlds where people live infinite stories. My photography works to make those worlds visible, to illuminate what they don't want us to see because the normality police wish it didn't exist. I am particularly interested in dissidence, neurodiverse people, sex workers, trans women and men. Everything that remains in the shadows of Western society and deserves to be seen, appreciated and empowered.
Q: Tell us about your work process! Do you plan your images ahead or are you more improvisational?
K: It's always a little different! Sometimes the idea appears and then I start looking for the person to help me materialize it and sometimes someone I know brings me the idea. I use social networks a lot to get in touch with people. Then, well, if you are a photographer you know that sometimes in the meeting you have a very clear idea, very strict, and in the contact with the other, in the exchange, that idea always becomes something else haha. The important thing is the "doing". Trying things.
Photo by Kenny Lemes
Q: What types of expectations for artists are most challenging to you today?
K: It's hard to generalize! In my particular case, I think the greatest expectation I feel from the people who follow what I do is that I do honest work. That my look at other people's bodies is respectful and that it doesn't feel like an extractivist thing, you know what I mean? That I"m not using people. I ALWAYS have those things in mind: LOVE AND RESPECT.
Q: What does being a feminist mean to you?
K: Feminism is, for me, a movement that must be intersectional, inclusive, welcoming and containing all minorities oppressed by patriarchy: women (cis/trans), femmes, queer and non-binaries. Becoming the oppressor of other minorities is not feminism. To be feminist is to empathize, to embrace, to include, to invite.
Photo by Kenny Lemes
Follow @kennylemes
