Kay Jane Browning

“Photographs are extremely complex but they seem so simple. They are complex because they have an inbuilt reverse angle of the photographer. They show the eye that saw this picture. They seem to be frozen in time but they have an incredible relationship to their past and to their future. They tell you about time although they are just a slice of time.” Wim Wenders. When I first began working with Kay I was struck by his depth of self knowing and have reflected at length both alone and in his company on this. Is there a more courageous statement of self-identity than to claim and fully inhabit a gender you were not given at birth? Kay describes his internal emotional world as an oscillation between gender identities. Perhaps we all inhabit varying degrees of the masculine and feminine, rather than the comfortably polarised, culturally moulded absolute of one or the other. For me as the photographer this moment with Kay held so much of his past, his journey to that moment and a clear sense of his self defined and continually rediscovered identity.