plus-sized, bearded, female-assigned nonbinary artist embraces their magic in new photo shoot

Swooning over photographer Eva Wǒ and visual and performance artist Wit López’s editorial-inspired collaboration, an identity-affirming, body-positive photo series that aims to challenge the politics of desirability through the celebration of fat, hairy, disabled, and non-conforming bodies. Almost a one-person parade, this photo series was also inspired by Wit’s interest in burlesque.

“I told Eva that I always wanted to try my hand at burlesque, but my fear of being more of a spectacle than spectacular kept me from doing so. Eva offered to be the photographer, and our shoot was born. This photo shoot is important to me as a disabled, fat, hairy, gender non-conforming Black person because it allows me to walk that line of spectacularizing myself in a performance way, while also reclaiming y power over how I am perceived as a human being. For me, this shoot was empowering and humanizing, and I’m grateful to Eva for capturing it.”

Check out this show-stopping series, below.

Credits:
Photographer: Eva Wo
Model: Whitney Lopez

Eva Wǒ is a mixed race queer femme originally from New Mexico and now solidly based in Philadelphia. Her work examines, celebrates, and creates visibility for queer and marginalized individuals and and underground communities. She takes a collaborative approach that honors the entire being, with limitless gender and sexual expression, free of stereotypes and subjugation, and works to enable her collaborators as creative agents of contemporary culture making.

Wit López is a Brooklyn-bred and Philadelphia-based disabled, gender non-conforming/nonbinary trans mixed media creator, performer, and independent curator of African American and Boricua descent. With two visual artists for parents, creating has always been a part of López’s world. Their work combines the skills their parents taught them: fiber art, painting, collage, and photography. The work also contains elements of their formal training in theatre and classical music, including costuming, staging, and props.

Their visual work and performance art uses their background in Anthropology and Africana Studies as a lens to examine, decolonize, and reconstruct aspects of their own identity. Through fiber and imagery, López explores hairiness, accessibility, queerness, gender identity, Blackness, and Latinidad, while also nodding lightly at absurdity and the macabre.

*Erin White is an Atlanta-based writer and AFROPUNK’s editorial and social media assistant. You can follow her on Tumblr or friend her on Facebook. Have a pitch or an inquiry? Shoot her an email at erin@afropunk.com.