Sara Stellino
Andy Adams and Sara Stellino
Curator Andy Adams, left, and photographer Sarah Stellino.
The face of farmland is often taken for a conservative one; however, the composition of the rural space and those who cultivate it is evolving.
Sarah Stellino’s photography captures those who are thriving in a place that is often stereotyped as hostile towards the queer community. Her portrait series, “Queering Rural Spaces,” recognizes and emphasizes their presence on homesteads. The exhibit is curated by Andy Adams and is on display at Madison’s Arts + Literature Laboratory through March 4.
The Madison-based Adams runs FlakPhoto, which grew out of Flickr and began as a photography blog. Adams shared one photo a day — submissions from photographers around the world. Now, FlakPhoto is an online community of photographers and photography enthusiasts comprising roughly 250,000 followers and subscribers across the newsletter and social networks.
By day, Adams is the digital director for the Outrider Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports and promotes multimedia storytelling about climate issues. However since the early 2000s, he has built a name for himself in the world of photography and visual culture.
“My passion is showing other photographers, promoting artists, promoting the people who make the work,” he says. “I’m a blogger and a curator at heart.”
Along with his experience running FlakPhoto, he has organized two group show exhibitions focused on Midwest photographers as well as a handful of local exhibitions. He is now on the Arts + Lit Lab’s visual arts curatorial board, and the “Queering Rural Spaces” exhibit is his first major project under A+LL’s photography program.
For Adams, Instagram and the social networks are a place to discover new artists and their photography. It is there where he found Stellino, a photographer who just happened to live a few blocks away. Her exploration of queerness in rural spaces around the country struck Adams personally. Having grown up in rural Wisconsin, he understands the urban versus rural way of thinking.
“One aspect of Sarah's work that I find really fascinating is that it kind of turns on its head one's assumptions about who country folks are, who lives out in the rural [areas] and what they look like,” Adams says.
Stellino’s analog approach to photography caught Adams’s attention. Analog photography allows Stellino to get to know her subjects over the course of the photoshoot. She uses a monorail camera, which can take around 10 minutes to set up and take a photo. While subjects are being photographed, they must be completely still in order to stay in focus. She then develops her film, which costs $10 for each image, in her own darkroom to make her own prints. The process and the cost requires Stellino to be far more purposeful in the photographs she takes than if she were using digital photography.
She also uses the tools of the digital world, though, “simultaneously leveraging all the benefits of social and digital communications to grow and reach her audience,” says Adams.
Portraits have always come naturally to Stellino. They provide her the opportunity to connect with people. People share very little of their true and intimate selves, Stellino tells Isthmus, and portraits allow her to glimpse into their inner worlds.
Stellino’s search for the right place to settle down with her wife led her to question whether a rural space would be safe and fulfilling. This search led to “Queering Rural Spaces,” an examination of how gender and sexuality intersect with rural living.
From Wisconsin to North Carolina, Stellino has been to about five states to photograph. She’s found most of her subjects through social media and word-of-mouth, and while they can be hesitant, Stellino tries to reassure her subjects that she has no intention of taking advantage of their stories. “I really want to build a relationship with them.”
Sara Stellino
Emi and Hannah in a field with trees.
Emi and Hannah, in an image from the exhibit.
She describes her experience with her subjects, Emi and Hannah, whose portrait is used as the signature image of the series. The two stand in the middle of their field with their arms around each other, a pig just off to the side. Emi, who was pregnant at the time, enjoys the transgressive nature of being in her female body but presenting in a masculine way.
“She was talking a lot about how being pregnant was really disconcerting for her in her gender identity…and how uncomfortable that is to not be able to do that, that she looks so standardly female,” says Stellino.
For Stellino, the series is still incomplete. She may continue photographing people around the country, otherwise she’s considering returning to a few of her subjects to capture them over a longer period of time.
Stellino’s storytelling and the personal narratives from the subjects of her portraits are key components to the exhibit, and for Adams, Stellino’s work puts a human face on “the other” in a country that is contending with “transitions in the social fabric.”
“They’re exquisitely-made prints, but the fact that she’s collected these personal narratives really humanizes the sitters,” says Adams. “In Madison…the differences that are on display are nothing that would be questioned, but in other parts of the country, it might be the case.”
The A+LL exhibit includes 18 prints, but the series holds many more. Adams and Stellino both hope to publish the work as a whole in a book.
On Feb. 25, The Arts + Lit Laboratory will be hosting a closing reception and artist talk from 6 p.m.-8 p.m.
“I'm inviting the folks that I've photographed who live in Wisconsin to attend the closing reception,” says Stellino. “Hopefully we will all be talking a bit more about their experiences living rurally as well as their experience participating in this project!”
