Louis Chavez

One Year Later | Experiments in Process
This year [2017] started off with a trip to Mexico City, where my close friend and I explored the city’s museums, nightlife, activist spaces and historical sites. We had been fleeing the cold New York winter, and the still recent reality that was stepping out of our TV sets and into the oval office. Mexico seemed to be an appropriate destination given the anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding the US presidential election. I had just been given my first roll of Kodak Tri-X and had been using that to document our trip around the city, and to the nearby ancient metropolis of Teotihuacán. Upon returning home, I was thrilled with the results of the film and soon picked up a bulk pack in order to keep shooting.

In the year since, I have come to experiment with push processing, stand development and multiple exposures — each of which carries their own respective characteristics and applications. I have been drawn to shooting portraits and taking a documentary approach to capturing my relationships with the friends and lovers from which I source a great deal of inspiration. It’s a thrill to make images that are explicitly queer, and to work with processes that I feel are complementary to this approach.

Bio
Louis Chavez is a musician, visual artist and zine maker based in New York. Their queer synthpunk & multimedia project, NO/HO/MO, is part of the Punk Start My Heart family, and has been featured on Bitch Media, Homoground, Radio Panik & Scream Queens Radio. Their video work has been on display at the MIX New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, and has been shown live and toured throughout North America. They have focused on incorporating photography into their practice since early 2017, taking advantages of the community resources available in Rochester, New York.

These images and more will soon be available in a large format newsprint zine. You can find more work at chavezlouis.com