JAYBIRD LISK

I am happy to introduce one of the cover boys of PNPPL zine 04 in a black and white series – ‘An afternoon with Mark’ captured by USA based photographer, Jaybird Lisk.

Jaybird Lisk photographs his vision of a particular slice of gay existence: a distinct world of evocative, tender beauty, to stand in juxtaposition with the sordidness and pessimism that often seem to permeate modern life. Always sincere, sometimes provocative, but never vulgar, Jaybird’s art depicts a queer arcadia located vaguely, somewhere in Ohio, that may or may not really exist.

Jaybird shoots real people, his friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, lovers. His subjects are always queer, and are never paid. Many have never had their picture taken before; a few didn’t even know that they were beautiful. Shoots are done in field and forest, or on rainy days in the studio, or in some abandoned building in the city. Always the goal is to find the real, honest beauty in the subject. When all the suffocating trappings of contemporary gay life are stripped away-the bars, the apps, the clothes, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety, politics; what’s left is the self, the radiant, hopeful, truthful, vulnerable self. It is this intersection of the honest and the ideal that Jaybird is trying to figure out with his work.