Flowers at Your Feet. Texas Isaiah's Archive.

Texas Isaiah is a Black transmasculine photographer and the first trans photographer to shoot for the cover of Vogue and Time. His project "Flowers at Your Feet" started in 2020 and is about memories, gratitude, beauty, and healing;. It is a collection of Black transmasculine portraits, the flowers are the people themselves (via).

Excerpts from an interview:

I was interested in developing a more concrete archive because I had lost a significant amount of people in an eight-month period. People from childhood had passed away, my coworker, and the last person was my grandfather.

Looking back, I didn’t have a visual archive of these people. I just had my memories, and there was a visual loss that resonated with me deeply. I started to think more about what it would look like to contribute to an everlasting archive. Black and brown POC trans people weren’t being imaged a lot during that time, so I thought about the ways I can do that differently that weren’t immediately tethered to media or traditional aspects of representation.

When I was creating the archive, which was Black trans people in general, I didn’t feel a full connection with a lot of the [other trans-centered] work that was being created, especially of just masculine people in general. There are so many reasons why there isn’t a lot more Black trans representation in the media. It was not so much that I wanted to be seen, actually. I wanted to be able to extend space to people who felt invisible, who felt that they didn’t deserve to be imaged. When we look at media, the transmasculine people that are popular and who are extended resources are white transmasculine people.

It’s so important for people to see themselves so that they are able to heal and grow from the things they’ve been taught. There is so much that is projected onto us, and the reality is that we haven’t always been in proximity to the most healthy terrains of masculinity. But I believe that Black transmasculine people — in the ways that we have cared and loved throughout history and today — are really shifting the perspective of what it looks like to be a person of good character who is also masculine.

The beautiful thing about Flowers at Your Feet is that it mostly highlights transmasculine people, which includes trans men. I think that there is so much nuance there because not everybody has the same relationship to their masculinity — not everybody identifies as a man.

And I’ve learned myself that other people desire specificity. I don’t need that for myself because I don’t think that there is always language to describe our existences, and I’ve made peace with that. Those gray areas are really beautiful to me, because that means that I don’t have to lock myself into something that I may grow out of. There’s such a deep desire to keep that open.

Inherently, I view transness as, like, such a deeply spiritual space. I believe that, you know, the spirit doesn’t have to have any specificity. I think that’s such a beautiful thing.

It (Flowers at Your Feet) was something that someone I dated a long time ago used to say to me. I asked them, “What does that mean?’ They said, you know, ‘I’m just giving you your flowers. I’m offering you gratitude.’” And when I was thinking about a Black transmasculine archive, and also the masculine archives that exist today, it was during that era where people were creating a lot of images of Black masculine people and flowers.

That was so beautiful aesthetically, but I don’t think that conversation went as far as it could have. I think it stopped at aesthetics. I decided to use that title for the project to offer my gratitude to Black transmasculine people — past, present, and future — but also to contend with the images made at that time. There aren’t any flowers within the images I make; the flowers are the Black transmasculine people themselves.

Texas Isaiah

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photographs by'Texas Isaiah via and via and via