Ep 018: Justin J. Wee
A SHOT: So to start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
JUSTIN J. WEE: This photo is a luxurious all-red dream. We have someone sitting in a red velour facekini with three hands coming into frame, all wearing velour opera gloves in the exact same color and fabric as the facekini and the backdrop. And the person wearing the facekini has a marble-y pink eye mask on and has a lip mask on, a very bright gold lip mask. Slung over the subject’s left shoulder is a very soft scarf, and the hands around the model are holding a wine glass with a little octopus crawling up the stem, a slow-burn candle by Kacey Musgraves and a gua sha tool, as well.
You described that almost as if this was a photo for a gift guide.
Yes, well, it is essentially a sponsored post, I guess.
So how does an idea like this begin? Where does something like this start?
The original seed for my idea, because I’m always trying to figure out how I can combine my love of portraiture with my love of still life… I initially wanted to shoot the gift guide [for Bloomberg Businessweek] on actual people. I wanted to cast queer and trans folks for the spread. My thinking behind that was just I’ve never really seen people like this in this sort of magazine. I’ve never seen bodies like this wearing super-expensive jewelry or having access to really nice wine glasses, so I thought it would be cool and subversive to bring those two things together. And I wanted to photograph it as if it was, like, a slumber party, and I was just trying to create more of a scene.
I was working with the [Bloomberg photo] editor Leonor Mamanna, who is amazing. She wrote back to me, and she was like, “I’m really sorry. We never use people in this spread. So how can we find a midway point between what you wanna do and what we traditionally publish?” And the thing that she said she really liked about the idea was the very kind of queer, drag-y element. The prompt for me then became how can I fit the brief of “cozy maximalism,” which is what the gift guide was themed around this year — or that year, rather — and make it feel drag-y and queer.
The idea to have these rich velour textures all throughout the spread came from that. And I was thinking about how I could work drag into the spread, and I thought, “Oh, what about commissioning someone to create these beautiful opera gloves so that people’s hands feel feminine and gay still?” Once I thought about that, I started to build on the glove idea and I was like, “If we have hands coming into frame, I want it to be because they’re making things happen in the photo,” building the scene. I then thought, what if we make this a commentary on the way that I kind of perceive rich people, which is that, you know, they want everything done for them, or they expect everything done for them, or they don’t really have an understanding of how much labor goes into creating a product or an experience. I thought, if we have these hands coming into frame, and they’re all in the same fabric as the backdrops and the surfaces and none of the hands cross their respective horizon lines, then maybe I can create a spread that kind of feels like a Where’s Wally? of hand models, and I thought, all together as an idea, that it spoke to the way that capitalism has desensitized us from really understanding the true breadth of how much work goes into creating a very small thing.
When that’s your idea, is that something that’s actually conveyed on the page, or is this all just kind of sitting in your intention of wanting to take the photo and they say, “Yes, we’ll let this photo exist how you want it to, but we’re still gonna plug these items”?
I guess it was just where my intention sat. And I think that ultimately what I wanted to do was, and ultimately in my photo practice, what I generally wanna do is center as many queer and trans folks and Asian folks as humanly possible. If I’m able to commission a queer designer to make the gloves, if I’m able to nod to elements of queerness that feel really representative of who I am, then, you know, I don’t mind that it is packaged within this very materialistic spread.
How do you prepare for the day that you’re actually gonna be taking this photo? Like, what kind of planning do you have to do outside of just having this idea?
I mean, this was a really intimidating challenge for me. Up until this point, I had never done a multi-day shoot. To go three days in a row, four setups, in hindsight now, it was lots of hard work and very tight, but it was fairly do-able. It was the first time that I was asked to select a group of products that I would be interested in shooting and then figure out how those products can be married together on a page. The Bloomberg team gave me proposed themes for each spread, and then I filled in some of the blanks. One of the questions that Leonor asked me at the very beginning was, “Take a look at this list, and tell me what you’re interested in shooting.” So I was able to then look through all the items and figure out what piqued my interest and then find where those items could be grouped together.
The process was actually very laborious and intensive. You know, at the end of the day, it’s something that I’m incredibly proud of because I literally sketched out all of the images that we made, and it was the first time really that I sketched a very specific plan about something and then was able to execute it pretty much as I had thought. But the process was me drawing up the proposed still lifes and then going shopping with the glove designer to make sure that all of the fabric had the right kind of stretch that they needed to have the gloves made. And I had to choose all of the backgrounds and the surfaces way before the shoot because I had to give the designer enough time to make the gloves, and I also had to make sure that the backgrounds were appropriate surfaces for the [Bloomberg design] team to put text on. So it was a lot of juggling between the creative and also the practical elements of this spread. I was really grateful for the support that I received from the Bloomberg team because on the day that we went shopping for fabrics, they were on the phone with me approving things and asking for other options as well. It was a very intensely collaborative process.
And then on the [shoot] day, the prop stylist had come with all of their little tricks and things, and because it is a gift guide, we couldn’t have additional props that might take away from the items that were being featured. So his job ultimately was just rigging things, and there was a lot of rigging that I wanted to happen in the spread. Yeah, it was just like a really intense prep period, and then when we got to the shoot days, then it was about how can we make the movie magic happen?
So I usually ask people what is their setup for taking a photo like this, but for you, I think I’m more interested in can you describe the space around you when you’re working on something like this? Like, what does the studio or the room that you’re working in feel like? What do you surround yourself with when you’re doing something like this?
I did this in my studio, which is really nice and big and airy. It’s a little old. The floors are this gray-blue color, and it’s, like, wooden slats. There are missing boards, so it’s not the most uniform surface. The space that I like to create on set, I really try to bring good energy into a space. I’m sure that you can tell I’m a little “chaotic good.” I know that one of the strengths that I have is that I’m able to produce positive and productive energy on a set. So something that we were doing a lot of when we were shooting the photo was asking for very gay finger-posings, and I was asking for everyone’s pinkie to be up while they were holding all the various objects. I try to create a very light atmosphere on set.
I’m quite a messy worker. My photo assistant that I had for this was Athena Torri, and she’s this amazing, cool, calm and collected woman. She’s just incredible. She was really a centering force for me on set from a practical standpoint. But yeah, I always try to bring positive energy into a space, and I think that I can read a room pretty well, so I understand who I have to be in that room at any moment. There were so many moments where I felt terrible for the prop stylist Eric Mestman, who did a really good job on this. Rigging is just such a tedious activity, and it’s so insanely frustrating, so I was always keeping tabs on how he was feeling and what I could do to lift the energy in the room if I had to. Or what I could do to support him.
On top of that, how are you making decisions on the day? And to some extent, how quickly do you take this photo? Like, this is one of many that you had to accomplish.
Executionaly, this photo actually didn’t take that long to produce because I knew that I wanted three hands in there, and we had enough items for each person to be holding something. The most challenging thing that we had to figure out was how the scarf should look on the person’s body and where the objects should be floating around the main subject. So this setup was actually pretty easy because the space was quite tight, as well. But it’s all about testing, and it’s all about having a plan and starting from there and just never being so inflexible that you can’t imagine something looking a different way.
What would be an example of something that you might change between frames?
We’re changing a lot of gay pinkies. I requested a lot of gay pinkies. I was using a star filter [on the lens] so we were also trying to make sure that different things were hitting the light. So we were just trying to find little variations. Sometimes the candle wasn’t straight. And the gua sha broke at one point. I was the hand that was holding the gua sha at the very top. Athena, my assistant, was firing the shutter. I dropped the gua sha at some point, and then it just shattered. So we were trying to figure out how to tape it back together, whether or not it would be able to hold it, and then I was just willing my hands to not drop it again.
And actually, the two things… I lied earlier. So the scarf was challenging. Then, the other two things that were challenging: the face mask because when we placed it on the subject initially, it just didn’t sit right, and we ended up cutting it and safety-pinning it together, and then the lip mask is actually a really wet mask. It doesn’t stand up on your mouth like that. We tried so hard to have the model, who is the person who designed all of the gloves and the facekini — his name is Charlie Haddad… So we tried so hard to have Charlie put the lip mask flat on his face, and it just never worked. So then immediately it was about problem-solving how we could make that come together. Eventually what we did was we put the lip mask on some tape, and then we taped the tape to the facekini.
Still-life problem-solving.
Which is so exciting and so fun. That is part of the magic of this whole process. It’s crazy that I say that because I’m notoriously impatient, and that’s why I don’t like to bake because I can’t put something in the oven and then just watch it rise.
How important is process to you usually?
I’m going to take a more macro view of the word process. I moved into the studio in the summer of 2020. I was amongst photographers whom I really, really love and I also had access to a lot of gear because it’s a common space. We have a very open policy about sharing things, so I had so many V-flats, more modifiers than I’d ever seen in my life, so many lights, continuous lights, just crazy amounts of things that I’d never had access to before.
The process of working in still-life photography is a really gentle way of allowing myself to experiment and to not feel nervous about fucking up. I mean, it didn’t paralyze me, and I was still able to make work that I’m still really proud of today, but I never went to school for photo. I truly never thought I would be a photographer. I’ve only been working professionally as a photographer for the last three and a half years, and I’ve only been working in editorial spaces for two and a half years. I had this really profound seriousness about the way that I worked. And I felt like every job that I got was this very high-stakes exercise in execution. That really made me so afraid of experimentation, and so much of my early work was portraiture, and so much of the work that I love to do now is also portraiture still, but what doing more still-life stuff allowed me to do was experiment in a way that was free of someone else’s time. I wasn’t beholden to someone else’s schedule, and I had the flexibility to just test a bunch of different lighting styles and understand a little more deeply how I like things to look. That whole process has been really grounding for me over the last year. The process of being amongst photographers who I really love, getting to learn from them, and marrying that with the vision that I have for this spread, it was just such an amazing culmination of all the things that I had picked up along the way. And that’s a process that I try to engage in every time I shoot.
I think the thing for me that opened things up in my mind was just when you’re working with a person, there’s always the need to make this person look good. And when you’re working with still life, you can really just play around with ugliness.
Yes, and that question is something that I also ask on set all the time. When I get stuck trying to arrange something, my first instinct is to make it ugly and then figure out how you add and subtract elements to then create the photo that you like. Whenever I get stuck, the first thing that I do is create a mess. I don’t feel like you would describe my work as beautiful or perfect. I think my work is a little weird and very queer. Those are things that are not centered on perfection. So I really love to use ugliness as a starting point.
How important is the human element to this photo?
I think the human element is really important. I think the human element is the central part of the intrigue. It’s the thing that prompts you to ask, “Why?” or “What is this?” or “What does it mean?” Putting a body where you don’t think a body should go or would go, that’s always the most interesting thing.
I think my favorite part of the photo is the turn at the neck. How would you describe the body positioning here? And what was your intention with just the way you’d positioned the body?
I don’t think there was a practical basis for the head turn. I think the intention for the body positioning was just that I didn’t want to do it straight on. That’s so boring. And I think that I wanted to see the way that the lip mask was jumping off the person’s mouth. I didn’t want it to seem like it was flat. I like the way that the head turn does a better job of inviting your eye down the frame. So if we were to start at the head, your eye would go up to the gua sha, and then it would come back down, look at the mask, and then look at the lip part and then look at the scarf and the candle and then make its way to the wine glass. So I just felt like it created this nice flow-y line through the image. I don’t know if that was an intentional decision as I was shooting it. It is just what my eye was drawn to.
For me, I think there is also a level of uncomfortableness in the body presence in this image. It feels like we’re seeing something private, like some form of fetish or something even subservient. But at the same time, you’re ultimately offering things that are intended to deliver comfort. Are these things you were thinking about?
They were not things I was thinking about, actually, but I love that read on it. All of those things that you alluded to also feel very queer. The notion of some level of kinky sex play or some subservient dynamic, these are all things that are rooted in dynamics that sit outside of heteronormativity and patriarchy, I think.
But it just kind of came natural to your direction?
I think that Charlie was kind of uncomfortable as he was sitting for this. I mean, yeah, it was just natural to my direction.
I think it’s also, there’s a level of uncomfortableness when you take a face off of a body.
Yes. That part of it was more just a function of I wanted to completely anonymize this person, and I didn’t want the viewer to be able to project anything onto this person. Originally I wasn’t sure if it was going to be more of a gimp mask kind of thing, with eye holes and a mouth hole. Yeah, ultimately we just went for something that entirely covered their face.
Does the idea of camp play into this image?
That was a central word to this entire spread. I wanted it to feel very queer, and I wanted it to feel very camp, very over-the-top, very implausible but also plausible, in a sense, and I wanted to balance that sense of camp with materials that you would want to touch or that you would be intrigued by. I wanted it to feel like not grounded in reality but something that you still wanted to become a part of.
I find it interesting when people work in camp because I always think that there’s just a fine line that you have to walk with it. How did you reign yourself in or push yourself over the line?
I think that there were maybe more camp elements initially. Like, I had planned for the scarf to be flying, and then when we shot it, it just looked messy, and Eric, who’s the prop stylist, has this really refined, expensive eye, and when I talked to him about doing the job initially, I was like, “We have completely different aesthetics, but I think we could meet in the middle and make something that feels really expensive but also weird.” So the placement of the scarf ultimately, which is a thing that could be potentially the thing that takes you out of it the most — because it feels like an add-on to the scene — I think when I wanted it to be more fantastical and have it flying into frame, that was a moment where we photographed it, and we were like, “Actually, it looks bad, so let’s figure out how we can reel it back in.”
So we touched on this a bit at the beginning, but I liked that when you introduced me to this photo when you were suggesting it for us to talk about, you’d mentioned that there was the subversive element to it. How often do you find yourself working in a subversive element?
My love of photography and my love for what I do comes from, and this is true of so many photographers working now, but we all know the images that we didn’t get to see in the media growing up. As a queer Asian person I, living in China, would secretly log onto Out.com and read 10,000 articles on Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka. That was the only successful-gay-couple representation that was present when I was 14 or whatever. I was just very profoundly aware of, even though I really appreciated those secret moments that I had with gay media, I was very aware of the fact that I didn’t look like any of those people. So part of why I love to do photo work is because I feel like the act of centering queer and Asian bodies is subversive in and of itself. It’s definitely not the most subversive work that people are doing at the moment, but it is something that is really central to my photographic intention. Again, that’s not unique. There are so many of us who are informed, to some degree, by that history.
The images that I really like to create cast queer, trans, Asian or other minoritized folks, but the images are not centered on their identities, necessarily. I think it’s so much more powerful to photograph a group of queer people and have the photo not be about queer folks. It’s a photo about luxury. It’s a photo about “You should buy all of the items in this gift guide,” but every body in there is a queer person. And it’s one of those things where, if a queer person was to flick through this magazine, maybe they would look at those bodies and they would be like, “Oh, I know.” And that is kind of what I want to create in my work. It’s re-creating the stolen moment that I had with Out as a young kid, as I was accessing it secretly, and figuring out how I can show people the images that 14-year-old me would have wanted to see.
How did you first realize that you could do that with a photo?
I think that it happened very gradually. I was a really early adopter of Instagram. I used to participate a lot in their weekend hashtag projects. Every Friday they would release a theme for the weekend, and then you would go out and create a photo. I was living in Australia at the time, so end of Sunday night would be like Monday noon my time, so every Monday it became my ritual to take a photo to enter into these weekend hashtag projects. I was a 21-year-old kid who had a lot of feelings and was having a really hard time trying to find what I wanted to do with my life. Lots of queer and Asian people don’t have a great relationship with their body or their family or just anything really, so I was someone who had a lot of emotion, and I was trying to find an outlet for it. When I did these weekend hashtag projects, most of the time I was doing some weird and crazy self-portrait. It’s very strange to go all the way to the back of my Instagram and see all of these things that are still up on my feed. But that was, I think, the moment I understood that you can really express something through an image because that was how I received early attention in my quote-unquote career. I connected with a lot of people through me doing those self-portraits.
And then, as I had less of a desire to make images of myself, I started to understand that when you print something, it occupies space. If I was to print 10 pictures of you and send those pictures out into the world, that’s your body occupying space in 10 different ways than it had previously done. So I love that I can physically insert a body into a book, into a space, into a frame that ordinarily wouldn’t have been there unless I did it. I think that act is very political. That was, I guess, the way that I arrived at wanting to think about how I could create media that felt both subversive but also resonant in a way.
So as we kind of mentioned already, readers of Bloomberg aren’t really gonna know the intention of this unless they know you or they’ve read something about this photo. What does working this way allow you to do that, say, working loudly would not allow you to do?
I would have loved to have been able to do this loudly. No one ever said to me, “Don’t tell anyone about the intention of this photo.” But even as I discuss it with you, there is still a part of my body that’s like, “Uh, will I get into trouble for speaking about this photo in this way or the intention of this photo in this way?” Because I do know that it is a photo with an ethos that sits left of center.
In a very simple way, and I know the answer to this, but to play devil’s advocate: Why bother?
Because it’s what brings me joy. This is how I wanna show up in the world. Like I said, this was the first time I’d ever done a gift guide. It’s purely something materialistic. This is a spread to sell very expensive items. That’s not, like, what I wanna be doing with my career all the time. I was so excited to get to do it here. So it was, for me, just a matter of thinking, “How can I bring myself to this piece in a way that makes me feel like I still get to say what I wanna say to the world?” In the same way that I was trying to figure out how I can marry my love of portraiture with my love of still life, I was also needing to reconcile how I can bring myself to this piece of media that is not really part of my DNA.
So I read that before you got into photography, you were trying to be a writer. Is there storytelling in an image like this?
This, to me, doesn’t necessarily feel like storytelling. This feels like an invitation of intrigue. I want you to fill in the blanks here. I’m sure that you didn’t do this thing because I don’t think you were as much of a doofus as I used to be, but there was a period of my life where you know when you travel and you fill out the airport card and it asks you what your occupation is? There is a point where I would write “storyteller.” So bad! Really really bad, right? So when I hear the word storytelling, it’s a word that so many of us used at some point that every creative became a storyteller, and I actually don’t think that we’re all storytellers. To me this image is just an image that looks really beautiful. It’s meant to sell product, and I just wanted to make it as gay and as weird as humanly possible.
What do you think we can learn about you from this photo?
I think you can learn that I’m gay. Sold as advertised. And I think that you can learn a lot about the feeling that I wanna bring to my photography, which is a feeling of richness. I want it to feel like there is a sense of place here. I wanted to create a vibe. I do want to create work that’s really beautiful too, so I think that, hopefully, people get that from this photo, as well. I hope people can glean that I, as much as possible, like to think laterally. Maybe that’s just the Aquarian rising in me, that desire to always be a little weird. So stupid!
There was really a point in my life where I thought very literally about everything. I needed to understand everything. It was just the way I processed my life. I found it hard to think outside of the box because I was just so scared to do that all of the time. Being a queer Asian person, thinking outside of the box never wins you any points. There was just a really long time where I was trying to hold myself to some standard or example that was given to me. So thinking laterally is kind of my release from that. There are lots of subjects that I don’t understand, but latching onto, like, little elements of a story and then figuring out how I can spin those elements into something that feels resonant with me is something that I worked really hard to do throughout my career.
One of the defining moments for me when I think about why it’s so important for me to think laterally is like… So you mentioned in the e-mail that we met at a brunch with Jonathan Van Ness. The way that I know JVN is that we were in the final group of people being considered for the Queer Eye hosts. I went through that process with JVN. When we got to the chemistry test and it was eight of us in each category left and it was the finals of the whole thing, I was very quickly eliminated. I realized in the moment why I wasn’t the right person for the job, and it was because there was a moment where a producer asked us in our one-on-one interviews, “What would you say to someone if they say, ‘I only like NASCAR’?” I was so stumped. I was like, “What would I say to someone who only liked NASCAR?” I’d be like, “I don’t like NASCAR. Why do you like NASCAR?” That’d be the first thing that I’d ask you. “Why do you not like anything else except for NASCAR? That’s stupid.”
So I was obviously not the right person for this job, but after we came out of all of these interviews, I was speaking to other people who were in my category, and I was in the culture category. I was so struck by one of the answers that someone else gave which was, “When you watch a NASCAR race, you are feeling adrenaline through your body. The adrenaline that you feel through your body, someone else feels in their body when they listen to an aria or when they go to a theater. When you watch a NASCAR driver, that is a driver who has spent years and years and years of his life understanding how to drive that car. So when you go watch an opera, you understand that that person singing that aria has spent years and years and years learning how to create that sound with their mouth.”
Even recounting that answer to you now, I have chills in my body because it’s such a smart application of lateral thinking. Ever since that moment, I have thought, “If you don’t understand something, if you don’t get something, what are the things that are present in that subject that allow you to pull words or pull key ideas from it that you can then transmute through your body and then bring to an image?”
So how does that translate to this photo then?
What I was trying to do was make inanimate objects that I personally am not that interested in look interesting. There is an element of storytelling here in that all of these products are grouped together for a specific purpose. We wanted this to feel like a spa, relaxation kind of page. I wanted to figure out how I could make these elements look like more than just a bunch of objects thrown together. Still-life photographers are amazing because a photo can change completely just from a very minute movement of a small part of a frame. There are so many ways that still-life photographers can find newness in the way that they compose a frame, but that is not where my sensibility comes from. I need to feel like I’m shaking something loose when I’m ideating.
What do you think Justin 10 years ago would have to say about this photo?
I wasn’t taking photos 10 years ago, but at the very beginning of my Instagram career, every time someone asked me what I liked to photograph, I always said, “Anything weird,” and I think that Justin 10 years ago would look at this photo and be like, “I’m glad that you’re still doing things your way.” I think that he would be really proud of this photo.
At the beginning of my career, at that stage of my life, I didn’t think that I would become a photographer because I thought that photography was becoming an influencer on Instagram and going to lunches and ’gramming thing and staying in hotels. I truly had no understanding of what photography was. I had no grasp of how vast and how much people have said throughout the history of photography using their images. I just had no understanding of it at all, and when I was creating all these dumb self-portraits and weird things, I never thought that I would become a photographer because I was like, “I’m just too weird.” No one is gonna get this. And no one is gonna want to get it either. This is just a space for me to exist in. This is a space for me to talk about my emotions. This is a way for me to try and achieve some sort of vulnerability, which is another conversation because then the vulnerability became performative. I just never thought that I would be this person. Like, talking about this photo now, it’s very weird because it does feel like a full-circle moment, which I didn’t even realize until now. The me of 10 years ago wanted to photograph weird things, and when I was ideating for this spread, I was like, “I want some of these photos to feel weird and to feel me.”
What’s something that you’ve learned that’s given you the instinct to take this photo specifically?
I think something that I’ve learned is that people get it. I think that there was always a time where I had a little voice in my head that said, “Nobody’s gonna get it. Everyone’s gonna think it’s stupid. People are gonna think it’s too camp. Or too weird. Or too esoteric or whatever.” And actually people get it. And if people don’t get it, they can still find it beautiful. As long as you can fall into either one of those two camps, then I feel happy and satisfied.
So to close our conversation, what’s something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
My house, my new house. I moved into my own apartment, which is very exciting. It’s the first time that I have had to furnish more than a bedroom, and it’s the first time that I wanted to paint the walls of my house. Yeah, I mean, the process of setting up my own space is very cool. I get excited about receiving shower curtains. I’m figuring out how to mount shelves, measuring the diameter of my shower pipe so I can fit a new head onto it. Those are things that are making me feel very creatively exercised.
Interviewed on March 16 2021.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Rocket Science represents Justin J. Wee
Justin J. Wee’s Instagram
Bloomberg Businessweek: “What to Buy Everyone on Your Holiday Gift List”