This Photo Series Investigates the Power Play of Voyeurism

This Photo Series Investigates the Power Play of Voyeurism

Los Angeles-based photographer and artist Josh Paul Thomas' debuted his first solo exhibition titled REINTENTIONS. The inspiration? The phallus. Yes, you read that right. The show dealt with ideas surrounding power dynamics and liberation through, what an email described as, "the medium of C*CK."

While that sounds like a joke, it’s not. The 32-year-old creative is an actual, working photographer having had his worked featured in Vogue, Interview, Physique Pictorial and sustaining a long, working relationship with fashion designer Bernhard Wilhelm. (He’s also a film school graduate.)

This Photo Series Investigates the Power Play of Voyeurism

"Most of the fashion work is for someone else’s brand and look," Thomas told PRIDE of the difference between that work and this exhibition. "So it’s lending myself to that idea and trying to find a middle ground. Here, there’s nothing being sold except for the art work. So it allows me to be the most free that you can outside of painting, where you can just sort of create from the inside out."

Here, we talk to John Paul Thomas about his show and what he thinks it does for the language of queer imagery.

So where did you start with this series?

I started this series going to a nude beach for the first time. I happened to bring my camera that day, which was great. It felt like a very "Tom Bianchi in the Pines" sort of field. And everybody was really friendly and awesome. I just remember leaving the beach and looking at the photos and saying, "This is going to be my first show."

It’s sort of like my sexual adventure of voyeurism that day. You’re kind of on an adventure with me. The photos were all taken on Black Beach in San Diego over Gay Pride in 2016. It was my first time going to San Diego and people down there are very cool. Tthey don’t mind getting their photo taken. Everyone is DTF and very friendly. It was just from one naked event to the next, not even planned. It just happened to be like that.

The point of the show is the power dynamic. Can you explain that a bit?

In a lot of sexual experience there’s this sort of slave-master dynamic, especially with a camera. When there’s a camera you kind of become the master of the camera, but you're also a slave to the imagery and of being a voyeur. So it’s like I’m in control as to what I shoot, but when you are a voyeur and that's your fetish, you can’t help but look. You sort of go out of your way to look so in that sense you’re a slave to what’s going on.

I’m in control as to what I want to shoot but I’m also not in control because I can’t help but want to document it.

How does the viewer play into this?

I think it’s almost the same thing. The viewers eyes become the camera again. They are the voyeur. They could choose not to look, but they are going to because they want to see what’s happening. So they are just sort of following the flow if it. The way the images are, it’s not based on any one’s sole personality. It’s not a lot of faces or anything. It’s a lot of very obscured bodies and things like that. That leaves it in this very "fly on the wall" sort of way where you’re almost a part of the action, but you’re not.

How do you think this series plays into the overall visual language of queer imagery?

Well I think everything has been done before, but I think feelings are kind of like trends. These photos are sort of a throwback to a pre-AIDS time and a sense of freedom and not fear. And not over sexualizing. Not everyone here has fucking abs or is perfect. A lot of the imagery now that circulates in the queer world can be sort of vapid and nonsense. It’s sort of there one day and gone the next.

I don't think that a lot of people have good taste. I don’t think they can look at an image and say what’s good and what’s not. Not to say that my images are the best thing in the world, but I think it gravitates towards an idea that is different and a little more raw. It’s not fashion and it’s not muscle boys and all of that bullshit.

So can you tell me about the work beyond the imagery?

Well the connection for me is the painting and the oils are sort of what’s going on inside of me, and the photography is me not creating anything new, just documenting what’s going on around me. The film is just a moving image. It’s actually is what I moved to Los Angeles to do, to go to film school. Since I’ve really worked in all these different mediums in the past, it would have been weird for me to not include those in my first show.

Can you tell us a little about the films?

Well one is called Faggot, and it’s just about a faggot who is out of quarters while doing laundry one day and goes on a journey. He’s listening to music on the way back and he just, you know, does whatever a faggot does when he’s on the way to a laundromat.

REINTENTIONS is on view at the Museum as Retail Space in Los Angeles until February 24, 2018.