Well hello there! It’s nice to have you visit! I’m Travis Silverman and this is my Finding Handsome about page where I get to tell you a couple of things about me that you may or may not already know. That’s me with the camera. See how happy I look? That takes me to point # 1. See below.
Photo by: Amelia Reid
I’ve loved photography for as long as I can remember. Got my first SLR - Minolta X-700 in 1983 I think - age 12 - and took off running. My Dad set up a darkroom in our basement and WOW! total magic! More on this later but yeah, I have loved squinting my left eye and pressing my right eye to the viewfinder to make, compose and create images for about 40 years! Wow that’s a long time.
I’ve been genderqueer - or “something else” in the boy/girl department for as long as I can remember - so maybe more like 45-50 years. Tomboy, lesbian, butch, non-binary, transgender, name change, top surgery - it’s all been a series of navigating the world as the world navigates me right back. What a ride!
Well, mostly I just love non-cis-gendered masculinity and I love taking photos of people! So…that’s the short story of how Finding Handsome came to be. Read on for more juicy stuff!
Why subscribe?
Great question. Why subscribe?
Well, I suppose there’s a couple of good reasons for you to subscribe.
The first is if you like my photography and want to see more of it on a regular basis - stuff that won’t be on my website, or other social media places - so that’s pretty fun, right?
LJ © Travis Silverman
Secondly you might be interested in the content - the people, the faces, the stories of the folks featured here - “the handsomes”. Queer, masculine, genderqueer, butch, trans, nonbinary folks that navigate their worlds knowing some of what I know, that there is something extra we carry with us out of necessity - strength, power, humility, grace, vulnerability, anxiety, fear - all or some of that anyway - when we don’t (or historically haven’t) fit into the neat gender boxes that are quite frankly, everywhere. It can be both exhausting and empowering, exhilarating and wearying. The road to handsome is not smooth but if you’re someone who’s interested in the faces and the stories, the joy and the pain, the beauty and the handsome of the folks who find their way here, well then I suppose that’s reason number 2.
More later, because I’m excited to get started!
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