Jacob Clayton

Words cannot adequately express what it’s like to go through life in the wrong body. The turbulence of confusion, desperation, fear, and isolation creates a sustained trauma from which I had found very little escape. But after almost four decades of diagnoses, therapists, pharmaceuticals, inpatient and outpatient hospitalization, and suicide attempts, I found art therapy. When I picked up a camera and began to depict my fractures visually, I came out of the closet as a transgender man and everything changed.

Gazing into the lens of my own life’s complexities, I document the double standards, hidden curricula, systematic microaggressions, and profoundly destructive groupthink about gender identity and mental illness. My current projects include Sustained Trauma, a therapeutic journey through dissociation and the road to gather and assemble the reclaimed pieces of a life. And Deprivation of Self, Portraits, which expands the vocabulary of photo-based art to explore and challenge cultural representations of gender.

Through these images, I seek to better understand the truths about myself and the world. And to be understood.