A native of Rhode Island, the photographer Michael Bailey-Gates first moved to New York after high school in order to meet and make work with the artists he had become friends with online. “The internet was my secret passage to photography as a kid,” he says, explaining that he would share his early images of his world through Flickr. “I was always making a big mess at home, taking pictures in private to put online. Photography has always felt forbidden and dangerous to me, but has brought me everything in my life.”
In New York, Bailey-Gates, 24, has continued to grow his network of collaborators, which now includes the artist, model and actress India Salvor Menuez, the singer Dev Hynes and the designers Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, all of whom have appeared in his provocative portraits. A recipient of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award in 2015, Bailey-Gates describes making pictures as a process that has “formed my identity, my relationships, the way I connect to the world.”
In this new body of work, “Horse in the Rough,” which debuts exclusively here, Bailey-Gates references early motion-study photographs — but applies a very current perspective, without the gender norms traditional to classical portraiture. “My photography is an imprint of my accumulated beliefs,” he explains. “I’m not trying to convince you of something, because to me it’s already true.”
Featuring both the photographer and his friends in and out of garments, the images depict environments teetering between the mundane and the otherworldly, embodying his wider vision of a fluid reality. “Gender isn’t real,” he says. “I want photography to support this fact. I want to challenge binary systems of thinking and overcome them.”
