About

Ace Cresswell is a Manchester based artist who uses analogue photography to explore the multifaceted experiences of queer and trans identities. He challenges traditional narratives of visibility, creating a space where the body is both celebrated and critically examined. He interrogates how the trans body is shaped and moulded through experience, navigating an estranged world where such bodies are often marginalised or misrepresented. He exaggerates the body into strange, dynamic forms, utilising the aesthetics of bodily excess to situate the body as a site of refusal against this.

His photoshoots reference the history of queer photography and its focus on representation and performativity, using the medium as a form of documenting his lived experience as a trans man. The physicality of analogue processes allows him to embrace experimentation and transformation, destabilising notions of digital repetition and perfection, creating entirely unique, individual prints.

He employs techniques of distortion when printing, using photography as a malleable material to warp the body into an extension of itself that defies clarity, circumventing immediate categorisation. This allows him to portray multiple intersecting forms of embodiment simultaneously, visualising the multiplicity of trans bodies beyond a binary model. He offers the body in this grotesque form to the viewer as an object they must confront, as a method of empowerment, a mode of radical resignification, a statement of defiance. Presenting the body in this way allows for a representation of trans and queer pride in identity, but also expresses the complex, invisible boundaries navigated along the journey to that.