Ransom Ashley: So Sexy
The NOLA photographer's newest work is fearless
When you think of Louisiana, chances are your mind jumps to Mardi Gras, New Orleans, comfort food and bayou voodoo. It’s a place laced with tradition and folklore dating back a few hundred years. Enter Ransom Ashley: powerhouse photographer, actor, and cinematography wünderkind with a taste for modern and edgy work. The young Louisiana native has the photography world all hot and bothered, so PROVOKR invited him to share some of the more intimate details about himself and his work.
PROVOKR: Your work primarily explores identity – what is it about identity that you find inspiring, and what do you learn about yourself in the process of creating your work?
Ashley: Identity is so central to my work because this fascination with human beings and who they are led me to the arts, first with theater, and started this path of self-discovery that eventually led me to exploring my own identity within my photography work. I find the exploration of identity so exciting because it’s so subjective and it’s a current that runs through my work as a photographer, actor, and especially as a student of psychology. Through my work, I learned a lot about how to make sense of what I was feeling about different times in my life, especially while coming of age. It helped me to create visual representations about what I was feeling because of the conversation it started and especially the way it allowed me to connect with others and understand those experiences and the significance of them.
P: What type of project makes you feel the most provocative?
A: I feel the most provocative when I explore themes that may seem taboo, whether it be gender norms or mortality, especially as I attempt to create a conversation around these things within communities in the South. It’s incredibly liberating to be free within your work and I suppose this sort of uninhibited freedom can be quite provocative.
P: Your photography is quite raw and honest, especially in a society that’s so accustomed to airbrushing. Can you tell us about how you make decisions as an artist whose medium is, in a way, simply real life?
A: Generally speaking, I attempt to capture, in the most authentic way a can, a representation of a time in my life whether it be focused on an emotion or a specific experience. The photograph is a means to an end, a means of communicating a message that I hope inspires something beyond the visual. I suppose my decisions reflect my priorities in the sense that my primary objective [is] communicating a story, a narrative that I feel will connect with people in some way.
P: What’s the sexiest photograph you’ve ever taken?
A: This is difficult – I find that most of my photographs don’t have any contrived sense of sexuality that I purposefully inject in them but what I personally find sexy is fearlessness and authenticity and this is most definitely embodied by so many of the people and themes within my work.
P: How have your own sexual identity and experiences shaped your work, particularly having grown up in the Bible Belt?
A: My experience growing up as someone who was very different from my peers made my coming of age experience much more tumultuous than it would’ve been otherwise. This gave me so much I wanted to say and really developed me emotionally and artistically in many ways because of the experiences and material it gave me to pull from and translate into so much of my work in every medium of my artistic life.
P: Tell us something about your first sexual experience – anything you’re comfortable with sharing.
A: My first time was in my twenties, a few years ago at this point, and was with someone I loved very much. I’ve never been very sexual in a traditional sense so the physical aspects of my relationships have always developed later. I guess you could say I’m more of a sapiosexual: I am always intrigued by the intellectual and emotional capacity of a person first and foremost.
