



1 / 16 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Melody Melamed

In transition, one’s gender identity may feel so nebulous, so unexternalized, that even one’s body seems not to be in on the joke. The issue isn’t just that the truths trans bodies tell—the evidence of change inscribed on them, suggesting their previous forms and features—may not correspond to the felt truth of inhabiting such a body. It’s that, however closely we examine trans bodies, the experiences written on them remain illegible from the outside. Has the person with breasts chosen not to pursue top surgery because their breasts are a part of their sense of self? Or was it because they couldn’t afford surgery, or were afraid of it, or didn’t know that it was an option? In our overwhelmingly cisgender society—one that is just beginning to forge a grammar for talking about trans experience—it can be tempting to present oneself in a way that is easily legible to others. But, thrillingly, the trans bodies featured in Melody Melamed’s photo series “Work in Progress” refuse to tell a simple story.

In choosing to photograph trans-masculine people, Melamed takes on the formidable challenge of using a static, visual medium to capture both an abstraction (gender identity) and the metamorphosis (transition) that seeks to express it. Each portrait offers a glimpse into what Melamed, a cisgender woman, describes as “a moment of total humbleness” amid the flux of transition. Melamed photographs her subjects in domestic spaces, in rooms whose dim edges offset the illumination of a scar, a crop of underarm hair, a throat, a shoulder blade. Seeing these features up close can feel like being let in on a secret.

Still, for all the openness and vulnerability of these bodies, the subjects of Melamed’s photographs are often turning away from her lens. One person looks above it, his green eyes hopeful and defiant, his cheeks scarred with acne and the barest hint of stubble. Another reticently turns his back and looks off to the side, as if he’s uninterested in returning the photographer's gaze. One could read these photographs as a testament to the self-consciousness, the discomfort, or even the shame of trans-masculine people. Or one could see them as a compendium of refusals—the refusal to account for oneself, to “pass” as one thing or the other, to have one’s experience treated as a metaphor for individuality or transformation.

Through a series of visual parallels so subtle they might appear incidental, the bodies of Melamed’s subjects echo the spaces in which they appear. In one photograph, shot in a dim, white bathroom, a horizontal stripe of blue mosaic tiles on the wall is set off by the bright red scars that cut across the subject’s pale, still-swollen chest. In another, the curves of a brown suede vest hang open across the half-hidden curves of the recumbent subject’s breasts. These parallels suggest a kind of collaboration between person and place, as if the individual and the room together created a space for the body, in all its ambiguous beauty, to live.

The smallness of these subjects’ rooms calls up contrasting images of all the larger, more public spaces in which trans people are constantly getting misread, misrepresented, or forced—for the sake of safety—to misrepresent themselves. Such enclosed, domestic settings also reflect the radical privacy of any gender-nonconforming person’s experience of their body. These bodies’ rough seams, the tiny rips in the fabric of their masculinity, might seem to expose some underlying truth about the history or nature of trans embodiment. And yet, what Melamed’s pictures reveal most indelibly is how little that nakedness can tell you.