REASON TO SMILE

Photographer Taking 10,000 LGBT Portraits For Massive Display On National Mall

we-are-you-self-evident-truths-campaignNew York photographer iO Tillett Wright has set off on a whirlwind tour of the United States to photograph exactly 10,000 people who identify “anywhere on the LGBTQ spectrum.”

So far, she has taken her camera to 51 cities and captured a diverse range of nearly 5,000 subjects in an effort to “humanize us for those that think they don’t know any LGBT people.” Once she snaps the final shot, she plans to take all 10,000 portraits to Washington, D.C. and lay them out in an art installation on the National Mall in front of the Washington Monument.

What sounds like a delusion of grandeur at first turns into an actually solid idea when you hear Wright herself explain the project, titled “We Are You”, the backbone of her Self Evident Truths campaign.

“In response to the avalanche of bigotry and misinformation about LGBTQ people, the Self Evident tram created the We Are You campaign,” she writes, “a simple message of love and support.” As an accomplished artist, she primarily takes issue with the way LGBT kids are often pressured and forced into hiding their true selves:

As a kid, you experiment and explore; that’s being a kid. You have terrible hair styles, you wear awful pants, you get 50 piercings that you take out when you’re 20.

This country is built on the pursuit of happiness, and you rob children of the opportunity to ever actually be happy when you tell them that a part of their identity makes them a freak.

Check out the project’s manifesto below, featuring the support of major industry players such as Kylie Minogue, Sia, and Penn Badgley. For more information on how you can help sponsor the Self Evident Project, visit SelfEvidentProject.com.

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