The New York-based American photographer breaks down binary perceptions of gender, identity and sexuality. Through his portraits, which are at once intimate and exuberant, queer and neoclassical, timeless and hypermodern, Michael Bailey-Gates reimagines human relationships in a playful, funny, theatrical and sensual way. Whether it’s celebrities, models or his long-time friends. The sets, the postures, the looks, the objects, the make-up, the costumes… Everything draws us into visual stories where man and woman, masculine and feminine, hetero and homo are no longer limited to the reductive framework of ready-made definitions that reassure society’s conventions. While his work often refers to photographers and artists, Michael Bailey-Gates sets aside existential drama in favour of an exploration of happiness. In his first exhibition and monograph, A Glint In The Kindling (2021), this young thirty-something takes a singular, sunny look at being, gender and the binary, existing both as subject and photographer. His self-portraits reveal beauty in all its simplicity. Like Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, Michael Bailey-Gates in turn affirms his vision of human individuality and the new ways of being in perpetual motion, playing with categorisation and the superficiality of terms. He seizes space, sublimates his world, disregards the cynicism of prejudice and offers not a new perspective but an alternative, letting those he captures live before his lens according to their desires, dreams and fantasies.
