‘Penal Colony’: Guest Álbum

Magazine creative work in KINK 20 (12 pages) + CUADERNO, 2014, pp. 116-127 90 (KINK 20); p. 4 (CUADERNO).

This Portfolio reimagines a similarly titled, unrealised film project by Jean Genet and further examines the subject and image of the gay fantasy figure, with reference to the Male Sexual Outlaw character Genet favoured. The Portfolio forms a visual base for the following paper: 'Tinker, soldier, sailor, thief: The visual representations and appropriations of the male sexual outlaw as a gay fantasy figure in the Arts and in fashion imagery.’

The Polaroid print with its distorted colors, unexpected characteristics and snapshot feel exists as artifact and a formal art object that is coming into being in real-time and relocates the photographic object and the subjects it depicts away from reality (and its representation in print) and into fantasy, with the images becoming more detached from the everyday world. At the time of writing the film script in 1952, the controversial, tropical French penal colonies have been officially abolished, and Genet’s narrative suggests a nostalgic yearning for these notoriously cruel spaces of incarceration in the wilderness. Genet infuses this enclosed world, inhabited by swarms of flies and naked prisoners with sudden acts of violence and masculine sexual tension which the Polaroids aim to recreate. The small square format and rectangular white border of these intimate photographs introduce rules of symmetry and geometry and create a frame through which the audience view young men engaged in conspiratorial performances, the prints appear to be struggling sometimes to contain their bodies or gestures, the form echoing their prison-like existence.

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