Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst

Zackary Drucker: My name is Zackary Drucker.

Rhys Ernst: This body of photographs is called Relationship, and it's a series of photos that Zackary and I, Rhys, have taken of ourselves and of each other and of our romantic relationship over the last five-and-a-half years.

It's also a documentation of our mutual separate transitions, gender transitions in opposite directions, myself from female to male and Zackary from male to female. 

Zackary Drucker:  One of the first photographs in the exhibition is a photograph of us in the mirror. I'm wearing a bra, and I have short, blond hair, and Rhys is standing behind me. I'm holding the camera. It's the first image that we took of ourselves. It was probably two weeks after we met, and that's where the project begins. As the photographs progress, a whole spectrum of human experience is captured, from this sort of honeymoon of falling in love, and finding somebody that you're totally aligned with in that moment, to all of the tensions and complexities that emerge. 

Rhys Ernst: I think one of the things about this body of work is there's kind of a duality between a caught unawares intimacy in a diaristic quality that's very in the moment and naturalized, and then there's also, on the other side of the spectrum, more of a self-awareness, and more of a performativity in seeing how we like to play with gender and ideas, and how we are creating images with an intentionality, and there's a range between those two modes of working.