Drag Queen Cowboys – Somerset House 9-12 September

Jane Hilton will exhibit Drag Queen Cowboys for the first time at Photo London this September

In May this year Jane Hilton’s Drag Queen Cowboys achieved 3rd Place, Professional competition, Portraiture at the 2021 Sony World Photography Awards. As the Sony Awards were virtual this year, due to Covid, this September, she will exhibit this series for the first time at Photo London 2021.

The London-based photographer first travelled to the States in 1988, sparking a fascination with all things Americana, which is the hallmark of her career.

In 1992 she first visited Nevada on a job shooting the desert landscape and she has continued to road trip her way across to this day. While the vast skies, endless highways and landscapes were the initial draw, it was the hidden or lesser-known worlds that beckoned. The bordellos where sexual exchanges are fulfilled, circus folk, cowboys and the places they called home are what brought her back again and again.

This time, it was the drag queens on the Vegas strip who made her hit the Nevada roads again. She was on an assignment in in 2019 in New Mexico and afterwards detoured to Vegas. On the lookout for new communities for her book on Nevada, Hilton ended-up at drag queen bingo by accident.

After experiencing the girls’ redefinition of the American dream one innuendo at a time, she was hooked.

From that moment she was on a mission to photograph members of this community, although it did take some persuading. Some had been photographed but in glitzy clubs in colour, lit with a flash and retouched.

Once she’d persuaded them out of the bars and clubs and onto the plains where John Houston shot ‘The Misfits’, (the film that inspired this series) they did their own make-up and picked their own outfits.

While shooting them on a plate camera in black and white, Hilton also enjoyed the emotional snapshots of the girls, while they revealed in the liberation and joy that drag afforded them.

Miss Alexis Mateo said, “When I am Alexis it’s just freedom to be whoever I am not. I get to be a little bit more crazy. I have the personality I want to have at night, and don’t excuse it. As a boy I am more shy, more reserved, more traditional. As a girl it gives me power. I do things in my girl person that I would never do. Literally drag is freedom for me. I am forty years old on paper. Inside I’m thirty-two. As a girl I’m twenty-one, and a virgin! As a girl I’m a virgin I’m telling you….waiting for the perfect man. As a boy, well that’s another thing….. “

Jane Hilton’s coffee-table books and portraits have featured in many of the world’s publications, galleries and art fairs. Her visual odyssey encompasses a modern folkloric Americana comprising communities of cowboys, working girls, burlesque dancers, gun club members and circus folk.