honorable mention
Kristin Lyseggen united states
title
The Women of San Quentin
I came to the understanding that the people who wanted to come forward with their stories from prison are moving towards becoming themselves no matter the costs. But their trauma will stay with them forever. If they didn’t have trauma before they went into prison, they certainly will have it by now. This project led me to a world of gender diversity; To a place with community spirit, advocacy and activism; to an immense struggle, unemployment and imprisonment among people with gender identity issues. I learned from these strong and humorous freedom fighters that humanity was to be found everywhere, even among severely abused individuals. I am using a Rolleflex twin lens and 120 film for this project.
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entry description
I started working on this project before we learned that Private Bradley Manning was Chelsea Manning and before we knew the popular Netflix TV show “Oranges Is the New Black”. In real life, women with gender identity issues are put in male prisons with notorious predators. Men born in female bodies are placed in female prisons. The only options for many of them in order to survive is by living isolated in a cage, or becoming a sex slave for another inmate. The Women of San Quentin is project about 10 transgender survivors in solitary; a project that led me from the war zone in East Oakland to a one bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin; From an ignorant village in Snellville, Georgia, to a transgender conference in Bangkok; From an event with former ‘FBI most wanted’ Angela Davis to a new LGBT project in Nairobi, Kenya; From ‘Wikileaks Private Manning’ to the “notorious, white suprematist bank robber” in Illinois who grew up playing with Madam Nhu’s children in Saigon.I came to the understanding that the people who wanted to come forward with their stories from prison are moving towards becoming themselves no matter the costs. But their trauma will stay with them forever. If they didn’t have trauma before they went into prison, they certainly will have it by now. This project led me to a world of gender diversity; To a place with community spirit, advocacy and activism; to an immense struggle, unemployment and imprisonment among people with gender identity issues. I learned from these strong and humorous freedom fighters that humanity was to be found everywhere, even among severely abused individuals. I am using a Rolleflex twin lens and 120 film for this project.
about the photographer
Covering subjects ranging from the Bedouins of the Negev Desert to religious sects in England´s West Midlands, photojournalist Kristin Lyseggen´s work highlights individuals within communities in the process of defining who and what they are. She has exhibited her work in Bangkok, Birmingham, Oslo, and London. Her photo documentaries have taken her to Morocco, Palestine, Israel, Thailand, and Cuba, as well as all corners of Europe. Kristin is based in Berkeley, California and Oslo, Norway. At the age of 22, Kristin Lyseggen was hired as a journalist on a newspaper starting up in her home city of Oslo, Norway. She soon discovered that she wanted to focus on otherness, as revealed through photography. She moved to study in Birmingham, England, where she found many subjects, including the Jesus Army, and a community of people in the West Midlands who meet and live as American cowboys every weekend. When she came upon a world of gender-fluid individuals, her experience left her wanting more. This led her to place an ad on a website when she returned to Norway in 2007, seeking participants in a project to illuminate the lives of people who consider themselves born in the wrong body. Little did she know that this would take her on journeys throughout the world. It also presented her with the challenge of how to present people who had made a leap from their natal gender, but appeared to the camera as normal as the next person. It was in their stories that she found her work for the next five years, the recently published book "The Boy Who Was Not A Lesbian and Other True Stories.back to gallery