DANIEL GRUNER

When I became disabled, decades ago, I felt this terror of my body and story exiting my sense of what fit into a full life. Not that I wanted “normal” through my teens, but when that door is no longer yours to walk through, it feels different. The appearance of my walk has been a disclosure I can’t choose not to make unless I let myself just not show up. To be seen as the one taking a photograph has been to choose to be seen even more, because I exaggerate my looking, inviting and accepting a greater looking at me. I know how easily that can be a locked battle for power - interpolation chicken - who will look away, maybe left stewing? I discovered, recently, that looking with a camera makes me aware of the otherwise-unconscious decision about how to respond to my felt-sense of vulnerability in being seen. I develop myself as a humanist, disabled and queer photographer, being in self-soothing and self-validating dialogue with my concern that many in the world I look at see me as somehow falling outside of it. 

“See me beautiful, look for the best in me. It’s what I really am, and all I want to be. It may take some time, it may be hard to find. But see me beautiful.”

(Song, Red and Kathy Grammer, quoted by
Nonviolent Communication teachers) 

I’ve tried to string together photographs as sentences in a lengthening meditation of refocusing on what is welcoming and, well, “good” about the people I’m seeing. I go in and out of ease with that. I get closer and more distant from it. These photos illustrate that process when considering where the picture was taken: how close up/in the mix or how far away, how much in the light while from the dark, how hidden or blocked. Out there though, regardless. 

Daniel Gruner (they, them) is a psychotherapist living in Pittsburgh who takes photographs and does some other creative, human things. A couple years ago, they returned to their teen hobby of taking photographs with big, clunky film cameras from the 70’s and 80’s.